The Portrait of a Lady Quotes

"But who's 'quite independent,' and in what sense is the term used? – that point's not yet settled. Does the expression apply more particularly to the young lady my mother has adopted, or doe...

"Well, I don't like originals; I like translations," Mr. Ludlow had more than once replied. "Isabel's written in a foreign tongue. I can't make her out. She ought to marry an Armenian or a Portugue...

American girls were used to a great deal of deference, and it had been intimated that this one had a high spirit. (1.87)

"The ladies will save us," said the old man; "that is the best of them will – for I make a difference between them. Make up to a good one and marry her, and your life will become much more in...

If his cousin were to be nothing more than an entertainment to him, Ralph was conscious she was an entertainment of a high order. "A character like that," he said to himself – "a real little...

She had had the best of everything, and in a world in which the circumstances of so many people made them unenviable it was an advantage never to have known anything particularly unpleasant. It app...

A secret hoard of indifference – like a thick cake a fond old nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit – came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice; since at...

"Isabel’s poor then. My mother tells me that she has but a few hundred dollars a year. I should like to make her rich." "What do you mean by rich?" "I call people rich when they're able to me...

[Mrs. Touchett] was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared to perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It had become clear, at an early stage of their community, that they shoul...

"But for me there are only two classes: the people I trust and the people I don't. Of those two, my dear Isabel, you belong to the first." (6.4)

One of these was a remarkably well-made man of five-and-thirty, with a face as English as that of the old gentleman I have just sketched was something else; a noticeably handsome face, fresh-colour...