Top 100 Quotes About Edith Wharton
#1. I live by Edith Wharton's rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.
Melissa Bank
#2. [Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes
S.T. Joshi
#3. I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'
Ken Follett
#4. 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
#5. I've never liked the telephone. It's a noisy, shrill intruder. If it were up to me, I'd ban all phones and bring back visiting days, like in Jane Austen and Edith Wharton novels:
Terri Cheney
#6. She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging.
Keith Gessen
#7. The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.
Charlotte Curtis
#8. You'll be amazed how much you have in common with Edith Wharton (who struggled to feel worthy of success), Louisa May Alcott (who badly needed money), Madaleine L'Engle (who could have papered an entire house with her rejection letters) and other writers...
Nava Atlas
#9. This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something.
Sierra Simone
#10. The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.
Michael Dirda
#11. In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.
Susan Wiggs
#12. I love Edith Wharton. And I love old New York. Anything to do with New York.
Leighton Meester
#13. James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton.
Hanya Yanagihara
#14. [T]he pain was unspeakable, worse than reading the collected works of Edith Wharton.
Kevin Hearne
#15. I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.
("Wants")
Grace Paley
#16. 'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.
James Frain
#17. Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.
Jonathan Franzen
#19. including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Kate Bolick
#20. Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:
'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.
Edith Wharton
#21. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,
Edith Wharton
#22. 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.
Edith Wharton
#24. A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.
Edith Wharton
#25. 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.
Edith Wharton
#27. 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.
Edith Wharton
#28. Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did.
Edith Wharton
#29. She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
#30. There are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
#31. I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy
Edith Wharton
#32. 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
#33. And he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes
Edith Wharton
#34. An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
Edith Wharton
#35. If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
#36. 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
#37. She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
#38. Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.
Edith Wharton
#39. Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
Edith Wharton
#40. And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.
Edith Wharton
#41. 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
#42. Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
Edith Wharton
#43. How beautiful it was
and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.
Edith Wharton
#44. 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
#45. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.
Edith Wharton
#46. He remembered once hearing his grandmother ... say plaintively: Why daughter, I presume I can go without
BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE.
Edith Wharton
#47. Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely.
Edith Wharton
#48. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
Edith Wharton
#49. Even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
#50. 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
#51. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts. -The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton
#52. Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.
Edith Wharton
#53. Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
#54. Bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate ... happens to me on a daily basis!
Edith Wharton
#55. Meanwhile everything matters - that concerns you.
Edith Wharton
#57. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
Edith Wharton
#58. To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can't people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?
Edith Wharton
#59. 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.
Edith Wharton
#60. Women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.
Edith Wharton
#62. But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.
Edith Wharton
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Edith Wharton
#66. No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity
Edith Wharton
#67. 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.
Edith Wharton
#68. Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. "How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman." She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.
Edith Wharton
#69. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
Edith Wharton
#70. We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.
Edith Wharton
#71. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal.
Edith Wharton
#72. The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.
Edith Wharton
#73. Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his;
Edith Wharton
#74. Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.
Edith Wharton
#75. 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
#76. Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.
Edith Wharton
#77. 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
#78. The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity
their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
Edith Wharton
#79. And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.
Edith Wharton
#80. The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but ... each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.
Edith Wharton
#81. 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.
Edith Wharton
#82. Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.
Edith Wharton
#83. 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
#84. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Edith Wharton
#85. The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him; it always hung on him in uneasy folds.
Edith Wharton
#86. 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.
Edith Wharton
#87. You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.
Edith Wharton
#88. Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
Edith Wharton
#89. I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.
Edith Wharton
#90. Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
Edith Wharton
#91. Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Edith Wharton
#92. Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.
Edith Wharton
#93. To know when to be generous and when firm - that is wisdom.
Edith Wharton
#94. Refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing
Edith Wharton
#95. 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
#96. He had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.
Edith Wharton
#97. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!
Edith Wharton
#98. I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
Edith Wharton
#99. Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
Edith Wharton
#100. 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.
Edith Wharton
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