Sublime

have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was married. It didn’t matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over.

laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language.

Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free.

he indulged himself in a waking dream of how their journey would go on and on – the dream of a deepening friendship and a profounder understanding, of a reconciliation even between their disparate faiths.

“What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!”

Emeline had always seemed occupied with watching everyone else and trying to be helpful, but she’d stayed on the sidelines, as if it weren’t her turn to live. William had thought the hesitation was part of Emeline—part of her personality—but now it was gone. She seemed fully alive in front of him.

“Ah! I have talked quite enough for to-day,” said Lord Henry, smiling. “All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.”

Culture is another route by which characters in life and fiction become the flawed and peculiar people they are.

then a castaway in the wide ocean of possibility,