Edith Wharton

Need quotes.

• “The motor-car has restored the romance of travel. Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of ou posting grandparents” (p.  1).
• “…the villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train — the unseen villages have been given back to us” (p. 2).
• “For, after all, if the motorist sometimes misses details by going too fast, he sometimes has them stamped into his memory by an opportune puncture or a recalcitrant ‘magneto’; and if, on windy days, he has to rush through nature blindfold, on golden afternoons such as this he can drain every drop of her precious essence.” (p. 36).
• “Had we visited by rail the principal places named in this itinerary, necessity would have detained us longer in each, and we should have had a fuller store of specific impressions; but we should have missed what is, in one way, the truest initiation of travel, the sense of continuity, of relation between different districts, of familiarity with the unnamed, unhistoried region stretching between successive centres of human history, and exerting, in deep unnoticed ways, so persistent an influence on the turn that history takes. And after all — though some people seem to doubt the fact — it is possible to stop a motor and get out of it” (p. 37).
• “To be back in the roar of traffic, to feel the terrific pressure of those miles of converging masonry, gave us, after weeks of free air and unbounded landscape, a sense of congestion that made the crowded streets seem lowering and dangerous” (p. 170).
• “There are several ways of leaving Paris by motor without touching even the fringe of what, were it like other cities, would be called its slums…. These miraculous escapes from the toils of a great city give one a clearer impression of the breadth with which it is planned, and of the civic order and elegance pervading its whole system; yet for that very reason there is perhaps more interest in a slow progress through one of he great industrial quarters such as must be crossed to reach the country lying to the north- east of Paris” (p. 172).

• “… and in the towns there is almost always some note of character, of distinction — the gateway of a seventeenth century hotel, the triple arch of a church-front, the spring of an old mossy apse, the stucco and black cross-beams of an ancient guild-house — and always the straight lime-walk, square-clipped or trained enberceau, with its sharp green angles and sharp black shade acquiring a value positively architectural against the high lights of the paved or gravelled place” (p. 3-4).
• “Yes — reverence is the most precious emotion that such a building inspires: reverence for the accumulated experiences of the past, readiness to puzzle out their meaning, unwillingness to disturb rashly results so powerfully willed, so laboriously arrived at — the desire, in short, to keep intact as many links as possible between yesterday and tomorrow, to lose, in the ardour of new experiment, the least that may be of the long rich heritage of human experience” (p. 11) 
• “The aqueduct, forming part of the extravagant scheme of irrigation of which the Machine de Marly and the great canal of Mainte- non commemorate successive disastrous phases, frames, in its useless lofty openings, such charming glimpses of the country to the southwest of Versailles, that it takes its place among those abortive architectural experiments which seem, after all, to have been completely justified by time” (p. 30)
• “Etampes, our next considerable town, seemed by contrast rather featureless and disappointing; yet, for that very reason, so typical of the average French country town— dry, compact, unsentimental, as if avariciously hoarding a long rich past — that its one straight grey street and squat old church will hereafter always serve for the ville de province background in my staging of French fiction” (p. 33).
• “Our way led across it, by the charming castled town of Pont-de-Chateau, to Clermont-Ferrand, which spreads its swarthy mass at the base of the Puy de Dome — that strangest, sternest of cities, all built and paved in the black volcanic stone of Volvic, and crowned by the sinister splendour of its black cathedral” (p. 55).“Travellers accustomed to the marked silhouette of Italian cities — to their immediate proffer of the picturesque impression — often find the old French provincial towns lacking in physiognomy. Each Italian city, whether of the mountain or the plain, has an outline easily recognisable after individual details have faded, and it is, obviously, much easier to keep separate one’s memories of Siena and Orvieto than of Bourges and Chartres. Perhaps, therefore, the few French towns with definite physiognomies seem the more definite from their infrequency; and Poitiers is foremost in this distinguished group” (p. 88).
• “Built in the twelfth century, by Queen Eleanor of Guyenne, at the interesting moment of transition from the round to the pointed arch, and completed later by a wide-sprawling Gothic front, it gropes after and fails of its effect both without and within. Yet it has one memorable possession in its thirteenth-century choirstalls, almost alone of that date in France — tall severe seats, their backs formed by pointed arches with delicate low-relief carvings between the spandrils” (p. 91).
• ‘The gashed walls and ivy-draped dungeons of the rival ruins make an extraordinarily romantic setting for the curious church of Saint Pierre, staunchly seated on an extreme ledge of the cliff, and gathering under its flank the handful of town within the fortified circuit. There is nothing in architecture so suggestive of extreme age, yet of a kind of hale durability, as these thick-set Romanesque churches, with their prudent vault- ing, their solid central towers, the close firm grouping of their apsidal chapels. The Renais- sance brought the classic style into such perma- nent relationship to modern life that eleventh- century architecture seems remoter than Greece and Rome; yet its buildings have none of the perilous frailty of the later Gothic, and one asso- ciates the idea of romance and ruin rather with the pointed arch than with the round” (p. 93).
• “In France, at least, there is perhaps nothing as suggestive of the fortified pleasure-houses of Italy as this gallant castle on the summit of its rock, with the town clustering below, and the vast terrace before it actually forming the roof of its church” (p. 138).

• “And thus one is brought back to the perpetually recurring fact that all northern I art is anecdotic, and has always been so; and that, for instance, all the elaborate theories of dramatic construction worked out to explain why Shakespeare crowded his stage with subordinate figures and unnecessary incidents, and would certainly, in relating the story of Saint John, have included Herod’s “Tray and Sweetheart” among the dramatis person — that such theories are but an unprofitable evasion of the ancient ethnological fact that the Goth has always told his story in that way” (p. 14).
• “But shall we not have gained greatly in our enjoyment of beauty, as well as in serenity of spirit, if, instead of saying ‘this is good art,’ or “’his is bad art,’’ we say ‘this is classic’ and ‘that is Gothic’ — this transcendental, that rational — using neither term as an epithet of opprobrium or restriction, but content, when we have performed the act of discrimination, to note what forms of expression each tendency has worked out for itself?” (p. 17).
• “And somehow, unreasonably of course, one expects the house to bear, even outwardly, some mark of that dark disordered period — or, if not, then of the cheerful but equally incoherent and inconceivable existence led there when the timid Madame Dudevant was turning into the great George Sand, and the strange procession which continued to stream through the house was composed no longer of drunken gentlemen- farmers and left-handed peasant relations, but of an almost equally fantastic and ill-assorted company of ex-priests, naturalists, journalists, Saint- Simonians, riders of every conceivable religious, political and literary hobby, among whom the successive tutors of the adored Maurice — forming in themselves a line as long as the kings in Mac- beth! — perhaps take the palm for oddness of origin and adaptability of manners” (p. 46).
• “The cathedral has its tapestries also — a series from the Brussels looms, attributed to Quentin Matsys, and covering the choir with intricately composed scenes from the life of Christ, in which the melancholy grey-green of autumn leaves is mingled with deep jewel-like pools of colour. But these are accidental importations from another world, whereas the famous Don Quixote series in the Archbishop’s palace represents the culminating moment of French decorative art” (p. 128).
• “They strike one perhaps, first of all — these rosy chatoyanies compositions, where ladies in loosened bodices gracefully prepare to be ‘surprised’— as an instructive commentary on ec- clesiastical manners toward the close of the eighteenth century; then one passes on to abstract enjoyment of their colour-scheme and balance of line, to a delighted perception of the way in which they are kept from being (as tapestries later became) mere imitations of paint- ing, and remain imprisoned — yet so free! — in that fanciful textile world which has its own flora and fauna, its own laws of colour and perspective, and its own more-than-Shakespearian anachronisms in costume and architecture” (p. 128-9).
• “There are two ways of feeling those arts — such as sculpture, painting and architecture — which appeal first to the eye: the technical, and what must perhaps be called the sentimental way. The specialist does not recognise the va- lidity of the latter criterion, and derision is always busy with the uncritical judgments of those who have ventured to interpret in terms of another art the great plastic achievements. The man, in short, who measures the beauty of a cathedral not by its structural detail consciously analysed, but by its total effect in indirectly stimulating his sen- sations, in setting up a movement of associated ideas, is classed — and who shall say unjustly? — as no better than the reader who should pretend to rejoice in the music of Lycidas without under- standing the meaning of its words.” (p. 177).

• “The country itself — so green, so full and close in texture, so pleasantly diversified by clumps of woodland in the hollows, and by streams threading the great fields with light — all this, too, has the English, or perhaps the Flemish quality — for the border is close by — with the added beauty of reach and amplitude, the deliberate gradual flow of level spaces into distant slopes, till the land breaks in a long blue crest against the seaward horizon” (p. 3).
• “Spring comes soberly, inaudibly as it were, in these temperate European lands, where the grass holds its green all winter, and the foliage of ivy, laurel, holly, and countless other evergreen shrubs, links the lifeless to the living months” (p. 73).“It is the season when, through the winter verdure of the Riviera, spring breaks with a hundred tender tints — pale green of crops, white snow of fruit- blossoms, and fire of scarlet tulips under the grey smoke of olive-groves. From heights among the cork-trees the little towns huddled about their feudal keeps blink across the pine-forests at the dazzling blue-and-purple indentations of the coast. And between the heights mild valleys widen down — valleys with fields of roses, acres of budding vine, meadows sown with narcissus, and cold streams rushing from the chestnut forests below the bald grey peaks” (p. 132).

• “Never more vividly than in this Seine country does one feel the amenity of French manners, the long process of social adaptation which has produced so profound and general an intelligence of life. They each had their established niche in life, the frankly avowed interests and preoccupations of their order, their pride in the smartness of the canal-boat, the seductions of the show-window, the glaze of the brioches, the crispness of the lettuce. And this admirable fitting into the pattern, which seems almost as if it were a moral outcome of the universal French sense of form, has led the race to the happy, the momentous discovery that good manners are a short cut to one’s goal, that they lubricate the wheels of life instead of obstructing them” (p. 28-9). 
• “This discovery — the result, as it strikes one, of the application of the finest of mental instruments to the muddled process of living — seems to have illuminated not only the social relation but its outward, concrete expression, producing a finish in the material setting of life, a kind of conformity in inanimate things — forming, in short, the background of the spectacle through which we pass, the canvas on which it is painted, and expressing itself no less in the trimness of each individual garden than in that insistence on civic dignity and comeliness so miraculously maintained, through every torment of political passion, every change of social conviction, by a people resolutely addressed to the intelligent enjoyment of living” (p. 29). 
• “There are several ways of leaving Paris by motor without touching even the fringe of what, were it like other cities, would be called its slums” (p. 172).