Edith Wharton Quotes

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

How I hate everything!

I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.

But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.

Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.

She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.

Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.

In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.

I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

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.

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

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

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 toward the watcher on the shore.

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

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

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.

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

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

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to

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