"The Age of Innocence" - Textual Quotes

Question 1

Spare Quotes

Answer 1

• “there are certain things which had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and of these in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswomen about to be eliminated from the tribe”
• “The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to the collective interest”
• “I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong - an unfairness - to somebody else”

Question 2

Love and Marriage

Answer 2

• “We can’t behave like people in novel ,though, can we?”
• “marriage was not the safe anchorage he was taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas”
• “He felt himself being drawn into the same spell that had fascinated so many others - the deadly conventionality of the ritual”

Question 3

Gender

Answer 3

-“Women ought to be free - as free as we are”
- “There was no use trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion she was not free”
- “after all, a young women’s place was under her husband’s roof”

Question 4

Class

Answer 4

• “The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matter”
• “Lawrence Lefferts was, on the whole, the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York”
• “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs”

Question 5

Hypocrisy

Answer 5

• “The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed - and pitied”
• “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it a copy of another country”
• “This undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in Beaufort’s past”

Question 6

Materialism

Answer 6

• “The taste of the usual was like cinders In his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future”
• “The young Girl who knew nothing and expected everything”
• “The inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destines of his forefathers thousands of years ago”

Question 7

Identity and Self-hood

Answer 7

• “each time you happen to me all over again”
• “He saw himself a prisoner in a tomb of convention and hypocrisy”
• “People who dreaded scandal more than disease”
• “She made no effort to seem conventional, and the very simplicity of her dress seemed an index of her nature”
• “I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past”