Edith Wharton Quotes

The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

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

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

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

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

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

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

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

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

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

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

Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person however dear and beloved but an expansion an interpretation of one's self.

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

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

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

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