Quotes about Society

Undine Spragg—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in.

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.

It was the old New York way, of taking life 'without effusion of blood''; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people's eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector's Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless's "afternoons".

At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.

It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.