Found very little quotes online that are associated with the fabulous short story The Touchstone by Edith Wharton, so I thought I would combine the ones that stuck out for me. Read it on the way home from Albany a few weeks ago and it had a tremendous impact.
The story of Glennard, all from his lens, is that of love-never-having-blossomed, but the effects of it, the 'unloved' letters of a famous author (Miss Aubyn), are the source of his establishment, the basis of his marriage and the eventual comeuppance for going through with a despicable act of selfishness.
Wharton famously plays with the inner turmoil of Glennard and the effects of the preternatural Aubyn - although little is heard of her - is a constant threat to the world Glennard attempts to create. All quotes are referring to the Hesperus version, as always I recommend purchasing content - especially such a novella as sublime as this.
"Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses....To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, derisive evidence of his limitations..." (page 5)
"....her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justness - the intuitive feminine justness that is so much rare than a reasoned impartiality." (page 9)
"...a proportionate pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned with the outrageous. He was at an age when all the gifts and graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust." (page 11)
"The attitude of looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty....and while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to hide their defects and even to turn them into graces." (page 13)
"The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable light directing its small ray towards the past which consumed so little of his own commemorative oil." (page 16)
"Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival....This inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to a sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte." (page 18)
"Oh, come, come,' Dresham judicially interposed; 'after all, they're not love letters.' 'No - that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters.'" (page 41)
"We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours." (page 49)
"Our self esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct." (page 54)
"The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life." (page 68)
"...as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over." (page 69)
"The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands...[his] unwillingness to quarrel with him was the last stage of [Glennard's] abasement." (page 78)
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