Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “What’s the use – when you will go back?” he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.”

— Edith Wharton

252. “After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”

— Edith Wharton

253. “Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.”

— Edith Wharton

254. “You can’t imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he loves her – pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.”

— Edith Wharton

260. “I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: ‘Please give me Edith Wharton’s book’; and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read!”

— Edith Wharton

261. “For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.”

— Edith Wharton

262. “Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements.”

— Edith Wharton

263. “She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.”

— Edith Wharton

264. “The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.”

— Edith Wharton

265. “But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.”

— Edith Wharton

266. “The conventionality of the tribe is far more important than the happiness of the individual. In fact, the happiness of the individual ideally should rest in perpetrating the conventionality of the tribe.”

— Edith Wharton

267. “It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

— Edith Wharton

268. “Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of.”

— Edith Wharton

269. “She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.”

— Edith Wharton

270. “She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce – the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice – but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.”

— Edith Wharton

271. “Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.”

— Edith Wharton

272. “She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple.”

— Edith Wharton

273. “What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ’em out.”

— Edith Wharton

274. “She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.”

— Edith Wharton

275. “Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare...”

— Edith Wharton

276. “But then you come; and you’re so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.”

— Edith Wharton

277. “He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.”

— Edith Wharton

278. “He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.”

— Edith Wharton

279. “Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely.”

— Edith Wharton

280. “The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.”

— Edith Wharton

281. “That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.”

— Edith Wharton

282. “She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt.”

— Edith Wharton

283. “Every drop of blood in Lily’s veins invited her to happiness.”

— Edith Wharton

284. “The “Hazeldean heart” was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.”

— Edith Wharton

285. “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... 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

286. “She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.”

— Edith Wharton

287. “You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today. It’s a part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.”

— Edith Wharton

288. “His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.”

— Edith Wharton

289. “Obviously he had aspired too high, or been too impatient; but it was his nature to be aspiring and impatient, and if he was to succeed it must be on the lines of his own character.”

— Edith Wharton

290. “He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.”

— Edith Wharton

291. “But I’ve caught it already. I am dead – I’ve been dead for months and months.”

— Edith Wharton

292. “What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?”

— Edith Wharton

293. “Meanwhile everything matters – that concerns you.”

— Edith Wharton

294. “He knew enough of his subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it...”

— Edith Wharton

295. “But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in its mother’s arms.”

— Edith Wharton

296. “But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.”

— Edith Wharton

297. “Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.”

— Edith Wharton

298. “And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn’t got it himself?”

— Edith Wharton

299. “Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.”

— Edith Wharton

300. “He did not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone.”

— Edith Wharton