Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...”

— Edith Wharton

452. “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

453. “They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can’t say as they’ve hurried much to make our acquaintance.”

— Edith Wharton

454. “He had never seen anyone pack as cleverly as Susy: the way she coaxed reluctant things into a trunk was a symbol of the way she fitted discordant facts into her life.”

— Edith Wharton

455. “But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.”

— Edith Wharton

456. “Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.”

— Edith Wharton

457. “That Greiner house, now – a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before.”

— Edith Wharton

458. “It’s waiting for us: it seems to know.”

— Edith Wharton

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

463. “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

464. “She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.”

— Edith Wharton

465. “Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.”

— Edith Wharton

466. “She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.”

— Edith Wharton

467. “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.”

— Edith Wharton

468. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

470. “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

471. “But, my dear, it’s just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It’s because we know we can’t hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...”

— Edith Wharton

472. “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

473. “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

474. “There were moments of overwhelming lassitude, when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.”

— Edith Wharton

475. “Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?”

— Edith Wharton

476. “The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

478. “When she said to him once “It looks as if it was painted!” it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.”

— Edith Wharton

479. “Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”

— Edith Wharton

480. “That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.”

— Edith Wharton

481. “But in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all.”

— Edith Wharton

482. “After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world’s estimate, how little that was!”

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

486. “Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his;.”

— Edith Wharton

487. “He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.”

— Edith Wharton

488. “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

489. “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

490. “It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so little accustomed to go alone!”

— Edith Wharton

491. “I didn’t know Countesses were so neighborly.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

493. “His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme’s was a highly centralized polity.”

— Edith Wharton

494. “But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming guard about her.”

— Edith Wharton

495. “Lily laughed. “Merci du compliment!”

— Edith Wharton

496. “For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.”

— Edith Wharton

497. “The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.”

— Edith Wharton

498. “Few as they had been, they were thick with memories.”

— Edith Wharton

499. “After all, there was good in the old ways.”

— Edith Wharton

500. “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