The Mother's Recompense Quotes

“This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother's Recompense

“Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia,” she reflected, “they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother's Recompense

“It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense

“Well—it had all grown out of the other choice she had made when, years ago, she had said: “Thy gods shall not be my gods.” And now she but dimly guessed who their gods were. At the moment when her very life depended on her knowing their passwords, holding the clue to their labyrinth, she stood outside the mysterious circle and vainly groped for a way in.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense

“It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense

“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”.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense

“„Fericirea, la unele firi e ca o alunecare de teren pe munte.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother's Recompense

“Mereu aceeași platitudine și lipsă de relief, aceeași uniformitate a măștii americane, cu expresia ei de drăgălășenie inofensivă. … Chipurile lor semănau cu acele peisaje din Vestul Mijlociu, cu acei nesfârșiți kilometri de lanuri de grâu care separă între ele două stații de cale ferată.”
― Edith Wharton, The Mother's Recompense