Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.”

— Edith Wharton

202. “Just so; she’d even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man’s again – I don’t mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in THEM.”

— Edith Wharton

203. “Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.”

— Edith Wharton

204. “Oh, I am – it’s much safer to be fond of dangerous people.”

— Edith Wharton

205. “Something in truth lay dead between them – the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.”

— Edith Wharton

206. “Oh, Gerty, I wasn’t meant to be good.”

— Edith Wharton

207. “The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity – their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.”

— Edith Wharton

208. “There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry – architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.”

— Edith Wharton

209. “There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.”

— Edith Wharton

210. “Ah no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.”

— Edith Wharton

211. “Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.”

— Edith Wharton

212. “The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.”

— Edith Wharton

213. “Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.”

— Edith Wharton

214. “Damn words; they’re just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn’t have to think in words...”

— Edith Wharton

215. “There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.”

— Edith Wharton

216. “You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women – my best friends – well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long – people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.”

— Edith Wharton

217. “Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape,” Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, “on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?”

— Edith Wharton

218. “Original! We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We’re like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can’t you and I strike out for ourselves, May?”

— Edith Wharton

219. “He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically.”

— Edith Wharton

220. “To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It’s the very reverse of what I want.”

— Edith Wharton

221. “Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.”

— Edith Wharton

222. “Because you’re such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing.”

— Edith Wharton

223. “The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”

— Edith Wharton

224. “Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.”

— Edith Wharton

225. “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

— Edith Wharton

226. “She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.”

— Edith Wharton

227. “From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.”

— Edith Wharton

228. “As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.”

— Edith Wharton

229. “Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.”

— Edith Wharton

230. “Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them...”

— Edith Wharton

231. “We shall hurt others less. Isn’t it, after all, what you always wanted?”

— Edith Wharton

232. “Xingu!” she scoffed. “Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did – unprepared though we were – that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!”

— Edith Wharton

233. “How beautiful it was – and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.”

— Edith Wharton

234. “There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.”

— Edith Wharton

235. “It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.”

— Edith Wharton

236. “Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations?”

— Edith Wharton

237. “In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.”

— Edith Wharton

238. “The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them.”

— Edith Wharton

239. “The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.”

— Edith Wharton

240. “The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”

— Edith Wharton

241. “Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.”

— Edith Wharton

242. “There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown.”

— Edith Wharton

243. “Of course he’s good-he’s too stupid to be bad.”

— Edith Wharton

244. “Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

— Edith Wharton

245. “She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”

— Edith Wharton

246. “It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But.”

— Edith Wharton

247. “She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an in an inarticulate well-being.”

— Edith Wharton

248. “As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

— Edith Wharton

249. “To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.”

— Edith Wharton

250. “In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.”

— Edith Wharton