Edith Wharton Quotes

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

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

Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.

There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them." Mark Twain "...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

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.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

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

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.

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.

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

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.

It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.

I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

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 philosohpically 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.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

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

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.