Edith Wharton Quotes

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

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

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

The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.

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

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.