Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?”

— Edith Wharton

452. “You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You’re right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.”

— Edith Wharton

453. “Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.”

— Edith Wharton

454. “All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.”

— Edith Wharton

455. “But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop.”

— Edith Wharton

456. “Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High Point.”

— Edith Wharton

457. “The extravagance in dress – ” Miss Jackson began. “Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them.”

— Edith Wharton

458. “The only way I can help you is by loving you,′ Selden said in a low voice.”

— Edith Wharton

459. “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.”

— Edith Wharton

460. “There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting fourth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.”

— Edith Wharton

461. “Archer’s New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.”

— Edith Wharton

462. “Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one’s sleeves and go down into the muck.”

— Edith Wharton

463. “Any personal entanglement might mean “bother,” and bother was the thing she most abhorred.”

— Edith Wharton

464. “Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular correspondents, that letters will be of special.”

— Edith Wharton

465. “She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?”

— Edith Wharton

466. “Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent.”

— Edith Wharton

467. “Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.”

— Edith Wharton

468. “The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth?”

— Edith Wharton

469. “He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But I’ve caught it already. I am dead – I’ve been dead for months and months.”

— Edith Wharton

470. “It was characteristic of her that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the passionate desire to obliterate, to “get even” with them, was always among the latent incentives of her conduct.”

— Edith Wharton

471. “Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy.”

— Edith Wharton

472. “Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been “plain people” and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The.”

— Edith Wharton

473. “It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.”

— Edith Wharton

474. “How impatience men are! All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time.”

— Edith Wharton

475. “He started to walk across the Common, and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a gray silk sunshade over her head – how could he have ever imagined her with a pink one?”

— Edith Wharton

476. “The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.”

— Edith Wharton

477. “The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.”

— Edith Wharton

478. “Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?”

— Edith Wharton

479. “The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling, and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion.”

— Edith Wharton

480. “It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to – this.”

— Edith Wharton

481. “It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph – to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed.”

— Edith Wharton

482. “He had no desire to marry at all – that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now –.”

— Edith Wharton

483. “Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.”

— Edith Wharton

484. “Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before – I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.” Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

— Edith Wharton

485. “Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.”

— Edith Wharton

486. “At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.”

— Edith Wharton

487. “She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to be beautiful.”

— Edith Wharton

488. “Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.”

— Edith Wharton

489. “It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow.”

— Edith Wharton

490. “The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in – two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.”

— Edith Wharton

491. “The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.”

— Edith Wharton

492. “She herself was large and saturnine, with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone to which the clue was lost.”

— Edith Wharton

493. “I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts – I hate ugliness, you know.”

— Edith Wharton

494. “Was she beautiful – or was she only someone apart?”

— Edith Wharton

495. “She read it over and shivered. Not one word of their past-not one allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their lives which had enclosed them in the other like the flower in its sheath! What place had such memories in such a letter?”

— Edith Wharton

496. “In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger.”

— Edith Wharton

497. “He had seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted – that she was sick to death of being alone with him. He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers on the steep above them. After all there was nothing sudden in his discovery. For.”

— Edith Wharton

498. “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You’re so shy, and yet you’re so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again – or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.”

— Edith Wharton

499. “Yesterday her fancy had fluttered free pinions above a choice of occupations; now she had to drop to the level of the familiar routine, in which moments of seeming brilliancy and freedom alternated with long hours of subjection.”

— Edith Wharton

500. “What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?”

— Edith Wharton