The Age of Innocence key quotations PDF

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The Age of Innocence- Key Quotations and Themes...

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The Age of Innocence- Key Quotes

Love/Romance/Relationships: “To proclaim to the waiting world his engagement to May.” (Chapter 2) “His joy was so deep…the surface left its essence untouched.” (Chapter 3)” “We’re along together, aren’t we? “Oh, dearest- always!” Archer cried. (Chapter 3) “Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination… of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they had both been brought up.” (Chapter 3) “Madame Olenska! – Oh, don’t, Ellen,” he cried… burnt into his consciousness.” (Chapter 9) “Rather gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska.” (Chapter 10) “She stood before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs.” (Chapter 21) “Suddenness of her surrender…laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless.” (Chapter 12)

“Her hand still clung to Archer’s; but he drew away from her…threw open the door of the house.” (Chapter 15) “Longing to enlighten her was strong in him.” (Chapter 15) “Kissed her… it was like drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it.” (Chapter 16) “May seemed to be aware of his disappointment but without knowing how to alleviate it.” (Chapter 16) “Ah, don’t make love to me! Too many people have done that.” (Chapter 17) “We won’t talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?” (Chapter 17) “None can ever happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two are together?” (Chapter 19) “May was still in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday … her clear eyes only the most tranquil un-awareness.” (Chapter 19) “The wonderful luck we’ll always have together!” (Chapter 19, May to Newland) “He knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful.” (Chapter 20) “She had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and a steadying sense of an unescapable duty.” (Chapter 21, Newland about May)

“Archer waited… but still the figure in the summer house did not move. He turned and walked up the hill.” (Chapter 21) “He felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances and she might vanish again before she could overtake her.” (Chapter 22, Newland about Ellen) “They found they had hardly anything to say to each other” (Chapter 23, Newland and Ellen) “Their kiss had burned and burned on his lips… the thought of her had run through him like fire.” (Chapter 23) “You gave me my first glimpse of real life.” (Chapter 24) “Half the width of the room still between them, and neither made any show of moving.” (Chapter 24) “He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings.” (Chapter 27, note sibilance) “Kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic.” (Chapter 29, Newland and Ellen) “Each time you happen to me all over again.” (Chapter 29) “How little they knew of each other, after all!” (Chapter 29) “Your vision of you and me together?” she burst into a sudden laugh… “we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.” “The only reality to me is this.” (Chapter 29, Ellen and Newland) “If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free!” (Chapter 30, Newland about May) “I shall never be happy unless I open the windows!” (Chapter 30, Newland) “To have you here, you mean—in reach and yet out of reach?” (Chapter 31, Newland) “He saw that her face had grown pale, was flooded with a deep inner radiance… he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.” (Chapter 31) “Her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her.” (Chapter 32, about May) “When he thought of Ellen Olenska, it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved.” (Chapter 33) “Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square… he thought of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at… he had been living with his youthful memory of her.” (Chapter 34) “Its more real to me here then if I went up,”… Newland archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.” (Chapter 34)

Gender Roles/ Expectations: “She pressed the dishevelled daisy to her lips… sat a young girl in white… warm pink mounted the girl’s cheek.” (Chapter 1 May) “He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton.” (Chapter 1) “He hated to think of May Welland’s being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of taste.” (Chapter 2, Newland on Ellen influencing May) “She was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year.” (Chapter 3, on Mrs Beaufort) “Her dress wasn’t smart enough for a ball.” (Chapter 3, On Ellen, clothes and reputation) “Women ought to be free—as free as we are.” (Chapter 5, Newland) “Generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had “lost her looks.” (Chapter 8) “She was a fearless and familiar little thing.” (Chapter 8, On Ellen) “Many people were disappointed that her appearance was not more “stylish”- for stylishness was what New York most valued.” (Chapter 8) “She should wait, immovable as an idol, while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at her side.” (Chapter 8, on Ellen and expectations)

“What must have given Madame Olenska this thirst for even the loneliness kind of freedom.” (Chapter 9, On Newland) “I’m not clever enough to argue with you. But that kind of thing is rather- vulgar, isn’t it?” (Chapter 9, May) “Mrs Rushworth was “that kind of woman”; foolish, vain, clandestine by nature. And far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed.” (Chapter 10) “There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur in the evening in a heated drawing room.” (Chapter 10, On Ellen) “I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past.” (Chapter 10, Ellen) “Aren’t you as free as air as it is?” (Chapter 10, Newland’s hypocrisy/arrogance) “You mean—I’m so evidently helpless and defence-less? What a poor thing you must all think me!” (Chapter 12, Ellen) “Her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity.” (Chapter 15, On May) “He did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!” (Chapter 15, Archer’s hypocrisy) “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.” (Chapter 20, May stuck in her social position) “May Archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her.” (Chapter 20) “She had fulfilled all that he expected.” (Chapter 21, Archer on May’s duty) “His wife answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic.” (Chapter 22, on Mrs Welland) “I’ve just done something so much more unconventional… I’ve just refused to take back a sum of money- that belonged to me.” (Chapter 23, Ellen) “It would be better for Madame Olenska to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that her husband’s standing gives her.” (Chapter 25, M.Riviere on Ellen) “After all, a young woman’s place was under her husband’s roof.” (Chapter 26)

“Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses.” (Chapter 27, on Mrs Beaufort) “The elder ladies agreed the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful in business had only one idea; to efface herself.” (Chapter 27) “A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.” (Chapter 31) “Silver-shining as a young Diana.” (Chapter 31, on May) “She was still fighting against her fate… And she was not returning to her husband.” (Chapter 32)

Class/reputation/society: “Lawrence Lefferts was, on the whole, the foremost authority on “form” in New York.” (Chapter 1) “The scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years.” (Chapter 1) “I am conscious of there being a shadow on Poor Ellen Olenska’s reputation.” (Chapter 2) “The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters.” (Chapter 3) “Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness… architectural incentives… the simple American had never dreamed of” (Chapter 4) “Well, we need new blood and new money—and I hear she’s still very good-looking.” (Chapter 4) “Terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl knew nothing and expected everything.” (Chapter 6) “Marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on the seas.” (Chapter 6) “Felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted.” (Chapter 6) “If we don’t all stand together, there’ll be no such thing as society left.” (Chapter 6, Newland’s mother)

“Parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped.” (Chapter 9) “The Van der Luydens,” said Archer, feeling himself pompous as he spoke, “are the most powerful influence in New York society. (Chapter 9) “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” (Chapter 9, Ellen) “Are you so much afraid ,then, of being vulgar?” “Of course I should hate it-so would you” she rejoined, a trifle irritably. (Chapter 10) “Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and should have respected the feelings of New York.” (Chapter 10) “New York is dying of dullness,” Beaufort grumbled. (Chapter 11) “New York society is a very small world…its ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people with-well, rather old-fashioned ideas.” (Chapter 12) “Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.” (Chapter 13) “Dear May is my ideal,” said Mrs Archer. (Chapter 17) “In Europe people don’t understand our long American engagements.” (Chapter 18) “The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life.” (Chapter 19) “His carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house cards.” (Chapter 19) “Was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives… She became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.” (Chapter 20) “I don't want them to think we dress like savages” she replied.” (Chapter 20, May) “Countess Olenska...remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.” (Chapter 21) “His floridness seemed heavy and bloated...his erect square-shouldered walk...over-fed and over-dressed man.” (Chapter 21, on Beaufort) “Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society.” (Chapter 22) “She had grown tired of what people called ‘society’” (Chapter 24, Ellen) “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” (Chapter 24,Ellen) “We’re damnably dull. We’ve no character, no colour. No variety.” (Chapter 24, Archer to Ellen) “Archer’s New York tolerate hypocrisy in private relations.” (Chapter 26)

“I don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for.” (Chapter 26, May on Ellen) “He moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency...absent-that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real.” (Chapter 26) “Afternoon announcement of the Beaufort failure was all in the papers…whole of New York was darkened by the tale of Beaufort’s dishonour.” (Chapter 28) “You’ll catch your death.” He felt like adding : “But I've caught it already. I am dead” (Chapter 30, Newland to May on closing the window) “There was May, and habit, and honour, and all the old decencies that he and his people believed in.” (Chapter 31) “Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.” (Chapter 34)...