Edith Wharton Quotes

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.

Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

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

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

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

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

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

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.