Edith Wharton Quotes
There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.
Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.
