Top 100 Edith Wharton Quotes
#1. Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did.
Edith Wharton
#2. I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy
Edith Wharton
#3. You can't imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he loves her - pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!
Edith Wharton
#4. 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.
Edith Wharton
#5. She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
#6. Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.
Edith Wharton
#7. Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
Edith Wharton
#8. And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.
Edith Wharton
#9. Put into words by this selfish, well-fed, and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.
Edith Wharton
#10. After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Edith Wharton
#11. He remembered once hearing his grandmother ... say plaintively: Why daughter, I presume I can go without
BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE.
Edith Wharton
#12. A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left for college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.
Edith Wharton
#13. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts. -The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton
#15. 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.
Edith Wharton
#16. A smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.
Edith Wharton
#17. It's rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people - the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.
Edith Wharton
#18. 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?
Edith Wharton
#19. Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements
Edith Wharton
#20. 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
Edith Wharton
#21. I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.
Edith Wharton
#22. And suddenly, as he noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate.
Edith Wharton
#23. Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.
Edith Wharton
#24. It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.
Edith Wharton
#25. Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did - unprepared though we were - that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!
Edith Wharton
#26. She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.
Edith Wharton
#27. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.
Edith Wharton
#28. To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
Edith Wharton
#29. 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.
Edith Wharton
#30. All the girls feared their Father less than they did their Mother, because she sometimes remembered things and he did not. Lord Brightlingsea was swept through life on a steady amnesiac flow.
Edith Wharton
#31. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
Edith Wharton
#32. Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.
Edith Wharton
#33. 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.
Edith Wharton
#34. The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.
("The Triumph Of The Night")
Edith Wharton
#35. I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other ...
Edith Wharton
#36. But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing ...
Edith Wharton
#37. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
Edith Wharton
#38. It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
Edith Wharton
#39. Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
Edith Wharton
#40. The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.
Edith Wharton
#41. In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers ...
Edith Wharton
#42. They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton
#43. They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars
Edith Wharton
#44. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.
Edith Wharton
#45. ...and he was struck again by the religious revernce of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.
'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.
Edith Wharton
#46. It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.
Edith Wharton
#47. no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.
Edith Wharton
#48. Ut it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
Edith Wharton
#49. How I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
Edith Wharton
#50. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The
Edith Wharton
#51. Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.
Edith Wharton
#52. Though he sought simplicity, he dread dulness. Dimly conscious that he was dull himself, he craved the stimulus of a quicker mind; yet he feared a dull wife less than a brilliant one, for with the latter how could he maintain his superiority?
Edith Wharton
#54. She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.
Edith Wharton
#55. I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.
Edith Wharton
#56. She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.
Edith Wharton
#57. I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
Edith Wharton
#58. 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
Edith Wharton
#59. Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
Edith Wharton
#60. Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.
Edith Wharton
#61. One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton
#62. The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Edith Wharton
#63. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.
Edith Wharton
#64. But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
Muses which god he shall immortalize
In the proud Parian's perpetuity,
Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
That the night cometh wherein none shall see.
Edith Wharton
#65. 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.
Edith Wharton
#66. 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?
Edith Wharton
#67. His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.
Edith Wharton
#68. Every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
Edith Wharton
#69. Even women have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.
Edith Wharton
#70. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
Edith Wharton
#71. 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.
Edith Wharton
#72. He was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.
Edith Wharton
#73. Norton was supremely gifted as an awakener, and no thoughtful mind can recall without a thrill the notes of the first voice which has called it out of its morning dream.
Edith Wharton
#74. What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
Edith Wharton
#75. Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.
Edith Wharton
#76. - he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!
Edith Wharton
#77. So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
Edith Wharton
#78. But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.
Edith Wharton
#79. Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
Edith Wharton
#80. 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.
Edith Wharton
#81. 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
Edith Wharton
#82. In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.
Edith Wharton
#83. 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.
Edith Wharton
#84. Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
Edith Wharton
#85. Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
Edith Wharton
#86. 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!
Edith Wharton
#87. 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.
Edith Wharton
#88. 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.
Edith Wharton
#89. Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
Edith Wharton
#90. There are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
#91. In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
#92. Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities.
Edith Wharton
#93. What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
Edith Wharton
#94. 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.
Edith Wharton
#95. People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
Edith Wharton
#96. 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.
Edith Wharton
#97. 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.
Edith Wharton
#98. In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time ...
Edith Wharton
#99. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
Edith Wharton
#100. To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
Edith Wharton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
