Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.”

— Edith Wharton

452. “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

453. “To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.”

— Edith Wharton

454. “Nick had secretly wearied, if not of his wife, at least of the life that their marriage compelled him to lead. His passion was not strong enough-had never been strong enough – to outweigh his prejudices, scruples, principles, or whatever one chose to call them. Susy’s dignity might go up like tinder in the blaze of her love; but his was made of a less combustible substance.”

— Edith Wharton

455. “Mrs. Fairford smiled. “I’ve sometimes thought,” she mused, “that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he’s the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman – and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.”

— Edith Wharton

456. “Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.”

— Edith Wharton

457. “Passion,” the artist implied, would have been the dominant note of his life, had it not been held in check by a sentiment of exalted chivalry, and by the sense that a nature of such emotional intensity as his must always be “ridden on the curb.”

— Edith Wharton

458. “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

459. “The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s only means of quick communication! “Chicago wants you.”

— Edith Wharton

460. “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

461. “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

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. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

481. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

490. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

497. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

499. “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

500. “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