Important Quotations Explained
1. “That's
what I mean by his chance. . . . And to see that he does not miss
it is, in a word, what I've come out for.”
She let it all sink in. “What you've come
out for then is simply to render him an immense service.”
Well, poor Strether was willing to take
it so. “Ah if you like.”
2. His name
on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed
him doubtless just enough to make the world . . . ask who he was. . . .
He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it
should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover
because he was Lambert Strether.
3. This place
and these impressions . . . of Chad and of people I've seen at
his place—well,
have had their abundant message for me. . . . [T]he right time now
is yours. The right time is
any time that one is
still so lucky as to have. . . . .Of course I don't take you for
a fool, or I shouldn't be addressing you thus awfully. . . . Live!
4. He had
never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any
special dignity, of a private order. . . . [These objects] marked
Madame de Vionnet's apartment as something quite different from
Miss Gostrey's little museum of bargains and from Chad's lovely
home; he recognized it as founded much more on old accumulations
that had possibly from time to time shrunken than on any contemporary
method of acquisition or form of curiosity.
5. “It is
not a matter of advising you not to go,” Strether said, “but of
absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking
of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred.”
