Edith Wharton Quotes

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.

And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

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

I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.

Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.

...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.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

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.

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.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer

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

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.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.

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.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

...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.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

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

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

...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.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

How I hate everything!

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

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

I begin 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.

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.