Edith Wharton Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Life is made up of compromises.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

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.

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.

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!

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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

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

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.

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

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

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

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

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

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.

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.

Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

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.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

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

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

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

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.

Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them .

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

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.

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

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.

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

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

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

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.

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

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.

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.