Edith Wharton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edith Wharton on Wise Famous Quotes.

And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.

...she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room

His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.

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

Ah no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.

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

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

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.

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

Women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

Naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

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

Ah, he would take her beyond
beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.

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

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

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

He was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.

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!

But you'll get it back-you'll get it all back, with your face...

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.

And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn't got it himself?

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

Meanwhile everything matters - that concerns you.

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

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.

To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can't people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.

After all there was good in the old ways ... there was good in the new order too.

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.

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

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

She always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of prudence.

Caprice is as ruinous as routine.

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

and strolled into the other room.

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

She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.

A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself

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

Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;

He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.

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

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

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

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

Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it

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

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.

imagination WAS the eagle that devoured Prometheus!

Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom.

- he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!

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

But I am born happy every morning,

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

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.

He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.

She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.

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

Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?

Some things are best mended by a break.

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

The longed-for ships come empty home, founder on the deep
And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.

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

But these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion ... ("Afterward")

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.

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

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

is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama, all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and actions.

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.

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

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.

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

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

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.

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

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

You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of color you are using today.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.

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

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.

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

She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.

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

Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.

Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words ...

Chapter 1 Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed

How much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

I wonder what her fate will be?' 'What we've all contrived to make it,' he

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

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.

I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other ...

I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.