Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need – as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.”

— Edith Wharton

202. “One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.”

— Edith Wharton

203. “Ethan’s love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and “fellows doing things.”

— Edith Wharton

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

211. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

219. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.”

— Edith Wharton

248. “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

249. “When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.”

— Edith Wharton

250. “But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.”

— Edith Wharton