Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

303. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

305. “The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him; it always hung on him in uneasy folds.”

— Edith Wharton

306. “Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.”

— Edith Wharton

307. “She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him.”

— Edith Wharton

308. “If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.”

— Edith Wharton

309. “She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story.”

— Edith Wharton

310. “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.”

— Edith Wharton

311. “But there was something more miserable still – it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.”

— Edith Wharton

312. “The idea that reading is a moral quality has unhappily led many conscientious persons to renounce their innocuous dalliance with light literature for more strenuous intercourse. These are the persons who “make it a rule to read.”

— Edith Wharton

313. “It seems so to me,” said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.”

— Edith Wharton

314. “The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had “placed” one by one in enviable niches of existence!”

— Edith Wharton

315. “I’m improvident: I live in the moment when I’m happy.”

— Edith Wharton

316. “The stage was thought to have a shaping influence, for the most part a bad one, on youthful character and conduct in much the way television is thought to have in our day.”

— Edith Wharton

317. “She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.”

— Edith Wharton

318. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

— Edith Wharton

319. “Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening.”

— Edith Wharton

320. “His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.”

— Edith Wharton

321. “What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?”

— Edith Wharton

322. “It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.”

— Edith Wharton

323. “She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.”

— Edith Wharton

324. “Don’t let us be like all the others! she protested.”

— Edith Wharton

325. “At least,” she continued, “it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don’t know how to explain myself” – she drew together her troubled brows – “but it seems as if I’d never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.”

— Edith Wharton

326. “You see, Monsieur, it’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence?”

— Edith Wharton

327. “There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.”

— Edith Wharton

328. “In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.”

— Edith Wharton

329. “Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her.”

— Edith Wharton

330. “Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own.”

— Edith Wharton

331. “It was before him again in its completeness – the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance.”

— Edith Wharton

332. “Courage – that’s the secret! If only people who are in love weren’t always so afraid of risking their happiness by looking it in the eyes.”

— Edith Wharton

333. “You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring-that’s all.”

— Edith Wharton

334. “Archer disliked her use of the word “clever” almost as much as her use of the word “common”; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a “nice” woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.”

— Edith Wharton

335. “Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”

— Edith Wharton

336. “Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results.”

— Edith Wharton

337. “They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.”

— Edith Wharton

338. “Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.”

— Edith Wharton

339. “The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.”

— Edith Wharton

340. “I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.”

— Edith Wharton

341. “She seemed always to have seen him through a blur – first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference – and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.”

— Edith Wharton

342. “Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.”

— Edith Wharton

343. “When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness – as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.”

— Edith Wharton

344. “She knew that Virginia’s survey of the world was limited to people, the clothes they wore, and the carriages they drove in. Her own universe was so crammed to bursting with wonderful sights and sounds that, in spite of her sense of Virginia’s superiority – her beauty, her ease, her confidence – Nan sometimes felt a shamefaced pity for her.”

— Edith Wharton

345. “People struggled on for years with ‘troubles,’ but they almost always succumbed to ’complications.”

— Edith Wharton

346. “And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?”

— Edith Wharton

347. “But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”

— Edith Wharton

348. “Well – watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don’t think people happier in hell.”

— Edith Wharton

349. “But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety.”

— Edith Wharton

350. “Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?”

— Edith Wharton