Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

456. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

458. “Yes, he would be kind – kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate.”

— Edith Wharton

459. “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

460. “I wonder what her fate will be?’’ ‘‘What we’ve all contrived to make it,’’ he.”

— Edith Wharton

461. “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

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. “It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.”

— Edith Wharton

464. “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

465. “He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. 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

466. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

468. “Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”

— Edith Wharton

469. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

471. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

478. “There would be a perilous moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?”

— Edith Wharton

479. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— 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. “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

487. “There were moments when the vain hunt for her real self became so perplexing and disheartening that she was glad to escape from it into the mechanical duties of her new life. But in the intervals she continued to grope for herself, and to find no one.”

— Edith Wharton

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

491. “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

492. “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

493. “Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before – I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.” Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

— Edith Wharton

494. “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

495. “Her face was like a clear pool reflecting every change in a shifting sky.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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