Edith Wharton Quotes:

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

source: - "Vesalius in Zante (1564)" st. 12 (1902)

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Positive, Empowering Women, Social Good

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2005, Delphi Classics

Topics: Real, Loneliness, People, Kind People

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

Topics: Inspirational, Travel, People, Kind People, Foreign Travel

Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

Topics: Discovery, Irritated, Consequence

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

Topics: Education, Men, Interesting

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

Topics: Pain, Healing, Compassion

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

Topics: New York, Divorce, Diploma, High School Diploma

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

Topics: Life, People, Novel

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

Topics: Happiness, Butterfly, Winter, Monarch Butterfly, Caterpillars

Each time you happen to me all over again.

Topics: Love, Romantic, Being In Love, Love Literature, Literary Love

One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.

source: - A Backward Glance "A First Word" (1934)

Topics: Life And Death, Intellectual, Curiosity, Intellectual Curiosity, Big Things

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.

Topics: Happiness, Mirrors, Light

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.

Topics: Fate, Destiny, Men

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.

Topics: Soul, Acres, March

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

Topics: Achievement, Way, Ruins

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Topics: Definitions, Beloved, Classic, Irrepressible

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

Topics: May, Architecture, Sanity, Decoration, Symmetry

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “Early Short Stories: American Literature”, p.143, VM eBooks

Topics: Doors, Drawing, House

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

Topics: Beautiful, Eye, Thinking

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

Topics: Vanity, Weight, Nests

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

Topics: May

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Topics: Dramatic, Significance, Frivolity

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

Topics: Mean, Ideas, Illusion

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone

Topics: Hate, Self Esteem, Eye

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Topics: Criticism, Glitter, Weak, Weak Points, Criticism Of Others

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

Topics: Love, Dog, Animal

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

Topics: Silence, May, Speech

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Topics: Art, Fear, Immature, Modern Art

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

Topics: Life, Giving, Literature

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

Topics: Vision, Literature, Originality, Wealth Of Knowledge, Personal Vision

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.169, Booklassic

Topics: Inspiring, Air, Breathing

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

Topics: Inspiring, Mother, Sin, Monotony, Deadly Sins

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

Topics: Money, Thinking, Way, Great Money

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Half, Life Is, Trouble, Troubles In Life

The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.

Topics: Friendship, Jobs, Hug

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Topics: Music, Artist, Italian, Swedish, English Speaking

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

Topics: Women, Hair, Doe

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

Topics: Believe, Vanity, Self

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.

Topics: Groups, Puppets, Gestures

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

source: - Edith Wharton (2002). “Artemis to Actaeon and More: Selected Verse”, p.16, Wildside Press LLC

Topics: Action, Window, Drink, Aisle, Daytime

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Topics: Breakfast, Bananas, Shame

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

Topics: Tears, Enough, Subjects

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

Topics: Happiness, Fate, Thinking

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.

Topics: Happiness, World, Littles, Connoisseur, Dilettantes

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Topics: Air, Breathing, Ideas, Good Conversation

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 when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

Topics: Hands, Sick, Care, Lonesome, Care For You

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.

Topics: Silence, Lasts, Bed, Draining

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

Topics: Real, Keys, Two

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, the very meaning of one's soul.

Topics: Friendship, Best Friend, Self, Meaning Of Friendship, Friends Forever

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

Topics: Children, Thinking, Two, Away From Each Other

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Topics: Stories, May, Moral

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

Topics: Eye, Thinking, Animal

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

Topics: Art, Stupid, Eye, Exhausting

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.416, Delphi Classics

Topics: Real, Mistake, Women, Personal Experiences, Counselor

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

Topics: Believe, Self, House

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3642, Delphi Classics

Topics: Happiness, Art, Care, Handle With Care

Some things are best mended by a break.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1543, Delphi Classics

Topics: Quitting, Break

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “A Backward Glance”, p.285, Edith Wharton

Topics: Eye, Miracle, Ears, Daily Miracles, Old Memories

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4566, Delphi Classics

Topics: Men, Emotion, Reason

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

Topics: Wisdom, Firm, Knows

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

source: - "Ethan Frome".

Topics: Happiness, Happy, Women, Truly Happy, Self Happiness

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

Topics: Needs, Upkeep, Crumbling

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The Reef: American Literature”, p.206, VM eBooks

Topics: Broken, Together, Perpetual

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3676, Delphi Classics

Topics: Men, Trouble

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

Topics: Life, Giving, Bed

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “A Backward Glance”, p.285, Edith Wharton

Topics: Life, Next, Saddest

Life is made up of compromises.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4565, Delphi Classics

Topics: Compromise, Life Is, Made

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

source: - "A Backward Glance".

Topics: Writing, Age, Routine, Incessantly, Inclination

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.7523, Delphi Classics

Topics: Past, Long, Intellectual, Intellectual Curiosity, Insatiable

Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3128, Delphi Classics

Topics: Blessed, Heart, Pure

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

Topics: Reading, Book, Pages

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.299, Booklassic

Topics: Heart, Differences, People

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4977, Delphi Classics

Topics: Happiness, Running, Mind, Make Up Your Mind

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

source: - Edith Wharton (2011). “The Custom of the Country (鄉土風俗)”, p.1083, Hyweb Technology Co. Ltd.

Topics: Wine, Bottles, Opening, Bottles Of Wine

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.232, VM eBooks

Topics: World, Easy, Enough

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

source: - 1934 A Backward Glance, 'A First Word'.

Topics: Sorrow, Age, Aging

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

source: - Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman (2015). “The Decoration of Houses”, p.33, Courier Dover Publications

Topics: Balance, Desire, Sound, Symmetry

traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3542, Delphi Classics

Topics: Tradition, Lost, Hardest

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

source: - "The Fruit of the Tree".

Topics: Education, Men, Interesting

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “Early Short Stories: American Literature”, p.106, VM eBooks

Topics: Fall, Thinking, Events

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The House of Mirth”, p.12, Xist Publishing

Topics: Book, Mind, Want

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

Topics: Grief, Heart, Desert

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.

Topics: New York, Intelligent, Boston

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.6879, Delphi Classics

Topics: Beautiful, Art, Firsts, Useful Things, Beautiful Art

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Collected Works of Edith Wharton”, p.3355, e-artnow sro

Topics: Mad, House

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The House of Mirth”, p.60, Xist Publishing

Topics: Joy, Solitude, Taste

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1992, Delphi Classics

Topics: Flower, Sunrise, Arms

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.33, VM eBooks

Topics: Substance, Literature, Lilies, Supple, Stiffness

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The Reef: American Literature”, p.113, VM eBooks

Topics: Happiness, Wings, Feels

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2268, Delphi Classics

Topics: Soul, Vision, Trying

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.239, Booklassic

Topics: Clever, Liars, Giving

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The House of Mirth”, p.32, Xist Publishing

Topics: Tolerance, Mirth, Scene

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.39, Booklassic

Topics: Real, Arbitrary, Done, Hieroglyphics

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2061, Delphi Classics

Topics: Art, Breaths

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

Topics: Lovers, Incorrigible, Adventurer

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “A Backward Glance”, p.4, Edith Wharton

Topics: Routine, Caprice

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.495, Delphi Classics

Topics: Loneliness, Sky, Light, Taste Of Life

Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2933, Delphi Classics

Topics: Doe, Too Much

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.145, VM eBooks

Topics: Darkness, Sunrise, Harder

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Topics: Art, Freedom, Thinking, Shuddering

Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “A Backward Glance”, p.172, Edith Wharton

Topics: Upset, Tea, Inanimate Objects

How I hate everything!

source: - Edith Wharton (2006). “Summer”, p.3, Courier Corporation

Topics: Hate, I Hate

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

Topics: Memories, Life And Love, Certain

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

source: - Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

Topics: Country, Patriotic, Thinking

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

source: - "Old New York".

Topics: Mistress, Expensive

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “Ethan Frome”, p.82, First Avenue Editions

Topics: Spring, Winter, Shining, Haze

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.70, VM eBooks

Topics: Opportunity, Thinking, Remembers Everything

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Boredom, Afternoon, Might

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2008). “The House of Mirth (EasyRead Large Bold Edition)”, p.379, ReadHowYouWant.com

Topics: Noses, Red, Cry

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.218, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Solitude, Littles, Noise

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

source: - Edith Wharton (2008). “Old New York”, p.227, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Society, Used, States

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “Edith Wharton: Collected Stories Vol. 1 1891-1910”, p.377, Library of America

Topics: Smile, Light, Vivid

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.

source: - Edith Wharton, Barbara Anne White (1995). “Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome”, p.152, UPNE

Topics: Butterfly, Kissing, Arms, Cheeks

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2334, Delphi Classics

Topics: Writing, Letters, Way

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2014). “The Writing of Fiction”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Fiction, Narrative, Moments, Spray

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1980, Delphi Classics

Topics: Laughing, Littles, Wave

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.176, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Tragedy, Mask, Comic

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

source: - Edith Wharton (2014). “Edith Wharton The Dover Reader”, p.328, Courier Corporation

Topics: Looks, Able, Faces

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.

source: - "The Age of Innocence".

Topics: Thinking, Sea, Literature, Uncharted

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Topics: Time, Age, Leaves Of Grass, Breadth, Haughty

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “A Backward Glance”, p.142, Lulu Press, Inc

Topics: Writing, Pages, Way

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.136, Xist Publishing

Topics: Lonely, Children, Night

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

source: - Edith Wharton (2001). “Collected Stories, 1891-1910”

Topics: Girl, Falling In Love, Aunt

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The House of Mirth”, p.8, Xist Publishing

Topics: Fate, Civilization, Links, Bracelet

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

source: - Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

Topics: Beauty, America, Despair, Crass, Amenities

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1960, Delphi Classics

Topics: Together, Get Together

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2012). “Short Stories”, p.90, Courier Corporation

Topics: Leaving, Mind, Boards, Transient

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.81, VM eBooks

Topics: Beautiful, Fashion, Stupid

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.538, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Years, Long, Battle, Years Together

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

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Giving

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2048, Delphi Classics

Topics: Usual, Alive, Mouths

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “A Backward Glance”, p.216, Lulu Press, Inc

Topics: Book, House, Library, Dump

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.449, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Sea, Sky, Vision

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4525, Delphi Classics

Topics: People, Literature, Lines

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2743, Delphi Classics

Topics: Daughter, Mother, Children

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.764, Delphi Classics

Topics: Hate, Dark, Light, Dark Hair, Deepest Life

The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.

Topics: Distance, Giving, Warning, Crossings

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.275, VM eBooks

Topics: Helping, Remember, Moments, Loving Me

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.791, Delphi Classics

Topics: Cogs, Machines, Use

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3200, Delphi Classics

Topics: Long, People, Half

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2010). “The House of Mirth”, p.163, Giunti Editore

Topics: Self, Rejects You, No Turning Back, Old Self

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

source: - Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Collier Books, 1989

Topics: Generations, Furniture, Gas, Chandeliers

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

Topics: Real, Flower, Dust, Great Literature, Parthenon

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

source: - Ethan Frome ch. 7 (1911)

Topics: War, Years, People, Complication

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.209, Bibliolis Books

Topics: Country, Stupid, America

Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them .

source: - "The letters of Edith Wharton".

Topics: Giving, Faithful, Lovers, Folds, Signs Of Love

I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2147, Delphi Classics

Topics: Flames, Two, Yesterday

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

source: - Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman (2015). “The Decoration of Houses”, p.22, Courier Dover Publications

Topics: Use, World, Rooms

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.581, Delphi Classics

Topics: Real, Secret, Gold, Alchemy

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4119, Delphi Classics

Topics: Wicked, Wrong Person, Persons

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

source: - Ethan Frome preface (1911)

Topics: Loneliness, Winter, Profound, Below The Surface, Unfriendly

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2147, Delphi Classics

Topics: Reality, Vision, Looks

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.101, Bibliolis Books

Topics: Archer, Thinking, People

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2175, Delphi Classics

Topics: Forgotten, Reason

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

Topics: Love, Self, Serenity

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

source: - Edith Wharton, Barbara Anne White (1995). “Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome”, p.99, UPNE

Topics: People, Different, Stories

Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2130, Delphi Classics

Topics: Taken, Community, Tolerance, Precocious

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

source: - The Age of Innocence ch. 31 (1920)

Topics: Oats, Rotation, Crops

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2107, Delphi Classics

Topics: Men, Saws, Emptiness

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

source: - Edith Wharton (2001). “Early Short Fiction”, p.50, Electric Book Company

Topics: Sweet, Lying, Blue, Maple, Roofing

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!

source: - Edith Wharton (1950). “An Edith Wharton treasury”

Topics: Lying, Together, Poverty, Living Together

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

Topics: Believe, Saint, Believe In God

Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The House of Mirth”, p.188, Xist Publishing

Topics: Summer, Moon, Sky

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The Age of Innocence: American Literature”, p.144, VM eBooks

Topics: Girl, Adventure, Men

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.187, Xist Publishing

Topics: Destiny, Together, Half, Worlds Apart

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2085, Delphi Classics

Topics: Wife, Trying, Use

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.791, Delphi Classics

Topics: Goodbye, Saying Goodbye, Thinking

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

source: - Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.36, Bibliolis Books

Topics: Ignorance, Hypocrisy, Together, Foreboding

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2014). “The Writing of Fiction”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Stories, Form, Short Story

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The Age of Innocence: American Literature”, p.192, VM eBooks

Topics: Husband, Ties, Wife

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2014). “The Writing of Fiction”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Art, Abundance, Vocation

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2012). “The Age of Innocence”, p.129, Courier Corporation

Topics: Ideas, Needs, World

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The Age of Innocence: American Literature”, p.200, VM eBooks

Topics: Mean, Literature, Remembered

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

source: - Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

Topics: Love, Crush, Eye, I Have A Crush

I can't love you unless I give you up.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.148, Booklassic

Topics: Love You, Giving, I Can

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

source: - Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

Topics: Stupid, Thinking, People

To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

source: - Edith Wharton (2004). “In Morocco”, p.16, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

Topics: Morocco, Shapes, Lines

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

source: - The Age of Innocence ch. 34 (1920)

Topics: Duty, Worst

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.

Topics: Art, Believe, Pudding, Intervening

And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

source: - "The letters of Edith Wharton".

Topics: Marriage, Pain, Ties, Tugging

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2333, Delphi Classics

Topics: Divorce, Able, Sentimental

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2044, Delphi Classics

Topics: Reflection, Self, House

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2192, Delphi Classics

Topics: Memories, Regret, Lifetime, Inarticulate

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

source: - Edith Wharton (2006). “The Age of Innocence”, p.148, OUP Oxford

Topics: Wife, Long, House, Sharpness, Most Wanted

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.285, VM eBooks

Topics: Believe, Men, Easy

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.187, Xist Publishing

Topics: Passion, Bones, Feds, Caress

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

Topics: Thinking, Class, America, Glass Houses

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

source: - "Literary Love: 5 Wild and Wanton Classics".

Topics: Blessed, Eye, People

Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects —hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles — made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances. 'It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: "Use unknown".'

source: - "The Age of Innocence".

Topics: Time, Glasses, People, Utensils, Magnifying Glass

...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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Selected Works: Edith Wharton's Selected Works - The House of Mirth, Summer, The Age of Innocence, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome, The Touchstone”, p.188, Lulu Press, Inc

Topics: Mother, Sin, Monotony, Deadly Sins

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1665, Delphi Classics

Topics: Summer, New York, New Yorkers

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2162, Delphi Classics

Topics: Mean, Want, Way

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.

source: - Edith Wharton (2012). “The Age of Innocence”, p.42, Courier Corporation

Topics: Touching, Fans, Littles

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

source: - The Age of Innocence ch. 33 (1920)

Topics: New York, People, Disease, Old New York

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2015). “Age of Innocence”, p.58, Oxford University Press

Topics: Real, People, Happenings, Real Things

The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.

source: - "Complete Works of Edith Wharton".

Topics: Hands, People, Golden, Disloyalty, Tugging

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2016). “Madame de Treymes: American Literature”, p.27, VM eBooks

Topics: Littles

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.155, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Grief, Rose, Raindrops

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

source: - Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2113, Delphi Classics

Topics: People, Ems, Use