Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.”

— Edith Wharton

52. “I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”

— Edith Wharton

53. “Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

— Edith Wharton

54. “She gave so many reasons that I’ve forgotten them all.”

— Edith Wharton

55. “The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

— Edith Wharton

56. “The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.”

— Edith Wharton

57. “My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.” “Freedom? Freedom from worries?” “From everything – from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.”

— Edith Wharton

58. “It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”

— Edith Wharton

59. “She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.”

— Edith Wharton

60. “Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.”

— Edith Wharton

61. “He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.”

— Edith Wharton

62. “It was too late for happiness – but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on – don’t take it from me now.”

— Edith Wharton

63. “He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.”

— Edith Wharton

64. “Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”

— Edith Wharton

65. “They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you’re safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.”

— Edith Wharton

66. “She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.”

— Edith Wharton

67. “She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision.”

— Edith Wharton

68. “Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

— Edith Wharton

69. “What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader’s mind just as it left the writer’s – without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought – it has been read to no purpose.”

— Edith Wharton

70. “No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.”

— Edith Wharton

71. “Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.”

— Edith Wharton

72. “Mothers and daughters are part of each other’s consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.”

— Edith Wharton

73. “The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.”

— Edith Wharton

74. “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

— Edith Wharton

75. “Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.”

— Edith Wharton

76. “He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.”

— Edith Wharton

77. “Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.”

— Edith Wharton

78. “I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.”

— Edith Wharton

79. “Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”

— Edith Wharton

80. “To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?”

— Edith Wharton

81. “When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.”

— Edith Wharton

82. “The only thing to do is to hug one’s friends tight and do one’s job.”

— Edith Wharton

83. “Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.”

— Edith Wharton

84. “Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.”

— Edith Wharton

85. “Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.”

— Edith Wharton

86. “Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.”

— Edith Wharton

87. “What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

— Edith Wharton

88. “My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.”

— Edith Wharton

89. “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”

— Edith Wharton

90. “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”

— Edith Wharton

91. “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”

— Edith Wharton

92. “Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.”

— Edith Wharton

93. “It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

— Edith Wharton

94. “A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.”

— Edith Wharton

95. “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

— Edith Wharton

96. “She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.”

— Edith Wharton

97. “Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.”

— Edith Wharton

98. “But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”

— Edith Wharton

99. “Women ought to be free – as free as we are,′ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

— Edith Wharton

100. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe.”

— Edith Wharton