The Age of Innocence (1993)

Joanne Woodward: The Narrator

Quotes 

• The Narrator : Carriages waited at the curb for the entire performance. It was widely known in New York, but never acknowledged, that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

• The Narrator : Archer enjoyed such challenges to convention. He questioned conformity in private; but, in public, he upheld family and tradition. This was a world balanced so precariously that it's harmony could be shattered by a whisper.

• The Narrator : It was not the custom in New York drawing rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. But, the Countess did not observe this rule.

• The Narrator : As for the madness with Madame Olenska, Archer trained himself to remember it as the last of his discarded experiments. She remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

• The Narrator : They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphics world. The real thing was never said or done or even thought; but, only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

• The Narrator : Regina Beaufort came from an old South Carolina family; but, her husband Julius, who passed for an Englishman, was known to have dissipated habits, a bitter tongue, and mysterious antecedents. His marriage assured him a social position, but not necessarily respect.

• The Narrator : The burden of her flesh had made it long since impossible to go up and down stairs. So, with characteristic independence, she had established herself on the ground floor of her house. From a sitting room, there was an unexpected vista of her bedroom. Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement - which recalled scenes in French fiction. This was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies.

• The Narrator : He could feel her dropping back to an inexpressive girlishness. Her conscious had been eased of its burden. It was wonderful, he thought, how such depths of feeling could coexist with such an absence of imagination.

• The Narrator : Only by actually passing through the Crimson drawing room, could one see "The Return of Spring" - the much discussed nude by Bougereau, which Beaufort had had the audacity to hang in plain sight.

• The Narrator : The past had come again into the present, as in through newly discovered caverns in Tuscany where children had lit bunches of straw and seen old images staring from the wall.

• The Narrator : It invariably happened, as everything happened in those days, in the same way.