Edith Wharton Quotes

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegan...

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their addres...

True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing wh...

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what on...

Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm betwee...

What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.

This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she...

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in...

She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was b...

Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the str...

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the s...

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in it...

Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing...

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no cente...

She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indiff...

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude sh...

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape...

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story ...

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did lov...

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like ...

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--yourold self rejects you, and shuts...

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to h...

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself ...

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewel were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an...

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have ...

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, i...

Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had someho...

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods...

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall strai...

...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that i...

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he as...

I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it m...

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometime...

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there w...

...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all...

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind agains...

Each time you happen to me all over again.

..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be ...

His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that ...

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he w...

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" w...

She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the tas...

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; a...

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.

Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping...

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comfor...

You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to ensla...

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him ...

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattain...

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these k...

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a d...

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, y...

You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other ...

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can e...

...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one...

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, ...

There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owin...

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assu...

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises ab...

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else o...

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French ope...

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into wh...

It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that ...

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a par...

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinki...

He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not th...

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definition...

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, ...

Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part...

High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on t...

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person however dea...

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not m...

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas mi...

Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just a...

A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul fille...

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.