Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.”

— Edith Wharton

452. “Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”

— Edith Wharton

453. “What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”

— Edith Wharton

454. “It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that followed – while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled the spoon in his cup – Susy remembered what she had seen through the circle of Nick’s kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls.”

— Edith Wharton

455. “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

456. “If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.”

— Edith Wharton

457. “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

458. “And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances. When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms.”

— Edith Wharton

459. “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

460. “To me the only death is monotony.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

464. “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

465. “His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts at his heels.”

— Edith Wharton

466. “Because I – because I want to fell you holding me,” he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.”

— Edith Wharton

467. “Every one knows you’re a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you’re not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.”

— Edith Wharton

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

476. “The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.”

— Edith Wharton

477. “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?”

— Edith Wharton

478. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

480. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

482. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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