The House of Mirth

Lawrence Selden:
Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?

Lily Bart:
You speak as if I should marry the first man who came along.

Lily Bart:
Why is it when we meet we always play this elaborate game?

Lily Bart:
You never speak to me.

Lawrence Selden:
I'm never near you long enough.

Lily Bart:
I thought that I could manage my own life, but I have been foolish, foolish to the point of being compromised.

Lily Bart:
I have been about too long. People are tired of me.

Grace:
Men have minds like moral flypaper. They will forgive a woman almost anything except the loss of her good name.

Lily Bart:
Sometimes, I think a man understands a woman's motives better than her own sex does.

Lily Bart:
If obliquity were a vice, we should all be tainted.

Mrs. Peniston:
Only someone without family could make such a vulgar remark.

Lily Bart:
Aunt Julia, you are my family.

[to Lawrence]

Lily Bart:
Love me. But don't tell me so.

[to Grace at the opera house]

Mrs. Peniston:
Thank you for telling me, Grace. But I must say this unwelcome information has completely ruined the Mozart for me.

Lily Bart:
I am a very useless person.