Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

— Edith Wharton

102. “Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people’s lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.”

— Edith Wharton

103. “The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that’s the secret that most of your friends have lost.”

— Edith Wharton

104. “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”

— Edith Wharton

105. “Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.”

— Edith Wharton

106. “In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.”

— Edith Wharton

107. “I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.”

— Edith Wharton

108. “I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it’s because there’s nothing to worry them.”

— Edith Wharton

109. “You asked me just now for the truth – well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.”

— Edith Wharton

110. “The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.”

— Edith Wharton

111. “It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.”

— Edith Wharton

112. “As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.”

— Edith Wharton

113. “There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

— Edith Wharton

114. “Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.”

— Edith Wharton

115. “With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

— Edith Wharton

116. “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self?”

— Edith Wharton

117. “Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.”

— Edith Wharton

118. “The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness – too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.”

— Edith Wharton

119. “Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!”

— Edith Wharton

120. “Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. “How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.” She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.”

— Edith Wharton

121. “In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.”

— Edith Wharton

122. “It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be.”

— Edith Wharton

123. “An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.”

— Edith Wharton

124. “Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on the seas.”

— Edith Wharton

125. “I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction.”

— Edith Wharton

126. “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

— Edith Wharton

127. “The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”

— Edith Wharton

128. “Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.”

— Edith Wharton

129. “Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

— Edith Wharton

130. “Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”

— Edith Wharton

131. “We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.”

— Edith Wharton

132. “That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”

— Edith Wharton

133. “One cares so little for the style in which one’s praises are written.”

— Edith Wharton

134. “Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: ‘Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river’.”

— Edith Wharton

135. “I was never allowed to read the popular American children’s books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author’s knowing it.”

— Edith Wharton

136. “The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.”

— Edith Wharton

137. “All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.”

— Edith Wharton

138. “It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”

— Edith Wharton

139. “What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”

— Edith Wharton

140. “Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.”

— Edith Wharton

141. “It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them.”

— Edith Wharton

142. “She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.”

— Edith Wharton

143. “She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes – she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.”

— Edith Wharton

144. “Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

— Edith Wharton

145. “The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only, I wonder – the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?”

— Edith Wharton

146. “Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can’t bit on.”

— Edith Wharton

147. “There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.”

— Edith Wharton

148. “I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a hundred years since we’ve met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.”

— Edith Wharton

149. “Your coat’s a little shabby – but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

— Edith Wharton

150. “I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit.”

— Edith Wharton