Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.”

— Edith Wharton

452. “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

453. “New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort’s wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle.”

— Edith Wharton

454. “The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it seemed, understood without knowing.”

— Edith Wharton

455. “Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.”

— Edith Wharton

456. “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

457. “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

458. “She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted.”

— Edith Wharton

459. “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

460. “During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one’s feet.”

— Edith Wharton

461. “Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

464. “Not for the world would he have made a significant to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.”

— Edith Wharton

465. “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

466. “She stared, perhaps suspecting irony, as she always did beneath the unintelligible.”

— Edith Wharton

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

474. “If only life could end now- end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities.”

— Edith Wharton

475. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

482. “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

483. “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

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. “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

486. “Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose;.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

490. “Mrs. Peniston had kept her imagination shrouded like the drawing room furniture.”

— Edith Wharton

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

495. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

497. “But for the present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up, but to feel some one floundering in the depths with him: he wanted her to suffer with him, not to help him to suffer less.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

500. “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