Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?”

— Edith Wharton

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

465. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

482. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— 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. “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

488. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

491. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Edith Wharton