Edith Wharton Quotes

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
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton
I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person however dear and beloved but an expansion an interpretation of one's self.
Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Edith Wharton
Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.
Edith Wharton
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
Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need – as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.
Edith Wharton
We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.
Edith Wharton
She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. 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
Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
Edith Wharton
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Edith Wharton
Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.
Edith Wharton
Do you know, I began 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. We’ve been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.
Edith Wharton
...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.
Edith Wharton
His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.
Edith Wharton
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
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
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.
Edith Wharton
So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
Edith Wharton
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
Edith Wharton
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.
Edith Wharton
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Edith Wharton
You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one'spowers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, andtook to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a soi. And when one hears goodtalk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer itinwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worthbreathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of thesame self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur,to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earnenough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private' anything--is almostas chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge:an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in NewYork?
Edith Wharton
I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.
Edith Wharton
...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?
Edith Wharton
Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.
Edith Wharton
She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
Edith Wharton
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
Edith Wharton
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
Edith Wharton
...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.
Edith Wharton
Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
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
It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.
Edith Wharton
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
The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.
Edith Wharton
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
She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him.
Edith Wharton
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--yourold self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?
Edith Wharton
The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.
Edith Wharton
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
The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part.
Edith Wharton
This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.
Edith Wharton
They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewel were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces – the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The glow of the stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine. More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.
Edith Wharton
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton
I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.
Edith Wharton