The Portrait of a Lady By Henry James

(11) a certain nobleness of imagination… She spent half her time in thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion… It was wrong to be mean, to be jealous, to be false, to be cruel; she had seen very little of the evil of the world…

(61) inoffensiveness of failure

(65) ‘You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you’ve nothing left.

(76) for her love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her imagination was strong.

(90) He was not romantically, he was much rather obscurely, handsome; but his physiognomy had an air of requesting your attention, which it rewarded according to the charm you found in blue eyes of remarkable fixedness, the eyes of a complexion other than his own, and a jaw of the somewhat angular mould which is supposed to bespeak resolution. Isabel said to herself that it bespoke resolution to-night in spite of which, in half an house, Caspar Goodwood, who had arrived hopeful as well as resolute, took his way back to his lodging with the feeling of a man defeated. He was not, it may be added, a man weakly to accept defeat. l

(95) He had only forbidden himself the riot of expression.

(102) ‘Yes, I’m afraid of suffering. But I’m not afraid of ghosts. And I think people suffer too easily,’ she added.

(103) She had no talent for expression and too little of the consciousness of genius; she only had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior. Whether or not she were superior, people were right in admiring her if they thought her so; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly than theirs, and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confounded with superiority.

(105) Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

(111) ‘I’m much obliged to you,’ said the girl quickly. Her way of taking compliments seemed sometimes rather dry; she got rid of them as rapidly as possible. But as regards this was sometimes misjudged; she was thought insensible to them, whereas in fact she was simply unwilling to show how infinitely they pleased her. To show that was to show too much.

(118) But Isabel had need to remind herself that she was interested in human nature and that her foremost hope in coming abroad had been that she should see a great many people.  

(137) ‘I’ve no made her my bosom-friend; but I like her in spite of her faults.’
‘Ah well,’ said Ralph, ‘I’m afraid I shall dislike her in spite of her merits.’

(141) ‘An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue,’ Isabel declared.

(230) ‘She does everything beautifully. She’s complete.’

(236) I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

(241) She declared that in England the pleasures of smell were great – that in this inimitable island there was a mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the nostril

(242) “That’s the great thing,’ Isabel solemnly pondered; ‘that’s the supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you.’ And she added that such, when one considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation.

(251) ‘Why not – what have I got? Neither husband, nor child, nor fortune, nor position not the traces of a beauty that I never had.’
‘You have many friends, dear lady.’
‘I’m not so sure!’ cried Madame Merle.
‘Ah, you’re wrong. You have memories, graces, talents –‘
But Madame Merle interrupted her. ‘What have my talents brought me? Nothing but the need of using them still

(274) Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself.

(376) Madame Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately begins to decline – there being no point of equilibrium

(451) Her old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities, with the idea of some new adventure. A s younger person she had been used to proceed from one little exaltation to the other: there were scarcely any dull places between. But Madame Merle had suppressed enthusiasm: she fell in love now-a-days with nothing: she lived entirely by reason and by wisdom.

(455) A girl in love was doubtless not a free agent

(465) Still, who would say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found: they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

(479) Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.

(480) Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge and with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment.
[vis-à-vis tradition]

(529) ‘I don’t insult ; I’m incapable of it. I merely speak of certain facts, and if the allusion’s an injury to you the fault’s not mind. It’s surely a fact that you have kept all this matter quite in your own hands.’
‘Are you going back to Lord Warburton?’ Isabel asked. ‘I’m very tired of his name.’
‘You shall hear it again before we’ve don’t with it.’

(612) a woman has to has to change a good deal to marry