Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.”

— Edith Wharton

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

458. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.”

— Edith Wharton

465. “Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;.”

— Edith Wharton

466. “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

467. “All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people’s eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector’s Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless’s “afternoons”.”

— Edith Wharton

468. “It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth – Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it “right off.” And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.”

— Edith Wharton

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

472. “Newland never seems to look ahead,” Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: “No; but you see it doesn’t matter, because when there’s nothing particular to do he reads a book.”

— Edith Wharton

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

476. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

478. “What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

480. “IT rose for them – their honey-moon – over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own.”

— Edith Wharton

481. “Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?”

— Edith Wharton

482. “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

483. “Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

485. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

487. “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

488. “You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they’re breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

500. “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