Top 100 Wharton's Quotes

#1. 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

Wharton's Quotes #6714
#2. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #10722
#3. 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

Wharton's Quotes #14296
#4. Movement is most of what a bird is. When they're dead, they're only feathers and air.

William Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #15881
#5. My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #29464
#6. 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

Wharton's Quotes #33900
#7. 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

Wharton's Quotes #35015
#8. Some things are best mended by a break.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #45842
#9. 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

Wharton's Quotes #47389
#10. Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #50618
#11. She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #59532
#12. There are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #63081
#13. is pre-eminently a redemptive system. It

Ed Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #63264
#14. Sometimes looking so hard can make one blind.

William Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #69596
#15. I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #71398
#16. 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

Wharton's Quotes #75348
#17. And he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #77589
#18. An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #77734
#19. If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #79922
#20. 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

Wharton's Quotes #91004
#21. She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #93972
#22. Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #97661
#23. Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #111201
#24. And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #115975
#25. 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

Wharton's Quotes #123049
#26. 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

Wharton's Quotes #154906
#27. [Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes

S.T. Joshi

Wharton's Quotes #184573
#28. 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

Wharton's Quotes #193781
#29. 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

Wharton's Quotes #249357
#30. 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

Wharton's Quotes #281371
#31. 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

Wharton's Quotes #320452
#32. 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

Wharton's Quotes #373574
#33. 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

Wharton's Quotes #419070
#34. It's more real to me here than if I went up, he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #419195
#35. There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #471711
#36. Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #484809
#37. 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?

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #519582
#38. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #521683
#39. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit - that's what I call success.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #543022
#40. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #578011
#41. The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.

Charlotte Curtis

Wharton's Quotes #602523
#42. I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other ...

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #605819
#43. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #636315
#44. And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #647125
#45. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #674029
#46. Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #684038
#47. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #713676
#48. Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #735960
#49. ...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

Wharton's Quotes #773904
#50. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #791694
#51. He pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at it's centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #796367
#52. Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #819979
#53. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #848296
#54. I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #852424
#55. The same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #858280
#56. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #859218
#57. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #865153
#58. The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.

Michael Dirda

Wharton's Quotes #903050
#59. One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #930679
#60. Edith learned long ago that men are drawn to women who are either undeniably beautiful or alluringly vulnerable. She's never been either.

Jennie Fields

Wharton's Quotes #941454
#61. 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

Wharton's Quotes #948080
#62. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1010666
#63. W: Nobody's so gullible as scientists. All the phony mediums say so. Can't quite see why.

J: Oh, yes, it would be so. They think they know, you see. That's always dangerous.

~Wharton; Jessop

Agatha Christie

Wharton's Quotes #1049766
#64. The first time I flew, it was being alive. Nothing was pressing under me. I was living in the fullness of air; air all around me, no holding place to break the air spaces. It's worth everything to be alone in the air, alive.

William Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1065962
#65. 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

Wharton's Quotes #1097808
#66. I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1108553
#67. Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1128359
#68. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1176249
#69. Courage - that's the secret! If only people who are in love weren't always so afraid of risking their happiness by looking it in the eyes.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1232430
#70. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1236138
#71. What's the use - when you will go back? he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1252833
#72. Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1257130
#73. Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1260620
#74. 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.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1294416
#75. That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1309348
#76. You asked me just now for the truth
well, the truth about any girl is that once she's talk about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1340162
#77. She made no answer, and he went on: What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring - that's all.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1398216
#78. Lady Brightlingsea considered it her duty to fish out of this out darkness, and drag for a moment into the light, any person or obligation entitled to fix her husband's attention; but they always faded back into night as soon as they had served their purpose.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1407416
#79. She's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1409131
#80. What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1415537
#81. Oh, I am - it's much safer to be fond of dangerous people.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1429376
#82. It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1465602
#83. 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

Wharton's Quotes #1524050
#84. You can take the smartest kid at Wharton, the one who gets straight A's and has a 170 IQ, and if he doesn't have the instincts, he'll never be a successful entrepreneur.

Donald Trump

Wharton's Quotes #1527731
#85. I love free trade. I love the concept of free trade. Everything about it is good. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. They say, Let's go free trade.

Donald Trump

Wharton's Quotes #1528410
#86. 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

Wharton's Quotes #1536282
#87. There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.

William Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1539638
#88. After all, marriage is marriage, and money's money - both useful things in their way ...

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1604688
#89. Love is a combination of admiration, respect, and passion. If you have one of those going, that's par for the course. If you have two, you aren't quite world class but you're close. If you have all three, then you don't need to die; you're already in heaven.

William Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1611980
#90. 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

Wharton's Quotes #1632416
#91. Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day ...

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1650480
#92. Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1658502
#93. You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1701757
#94. When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1736738
#95. What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1752460
#96. 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

Wharton's Quotes #1765369
#97. And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1790858
#98. The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1856662
#99. But, my dear, it's just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It's because we know we can't hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1868201
#100. To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

Edith Wharton

Wharton's Quotes #1877309

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