Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Sir Helmsley imparted this information in a loud, almost challenging voice, as he always did when he had to communicate anything unexpected or difficult to account for. Explaining was a nuisance, and somewhat of a derogation. He resented anything that made it necessary, and always spoke as if his interlocutor ought to have known beforehand the answer to the questions he was putting.”

— Edith Wharton

352. “She had once more shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.”

— Edith Wharton

353. “But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided.”

— Edith Wharton

354. “Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.”

— Edith Wharton

355. “And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.”

— Edith Wharton

356. “Oh, certainly, ‘The Wings of Death’ is not amusing,” ventured Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to submit if his first selection does not suit.”

— Edith Wharton

357. “After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,” he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.”

— Edith Wharton

358. “All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.”

— Edith Wharton

359. “There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.”

— Edith Wharton

360. “But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.”

— Edith Wharton

361. “The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out – none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.”

— Edith Wharton

362. “What do you call the weak point?” He paused. “The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.”

— Edith Wharton

363. “To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.”

— Edith Wharton

364. “ON A JANUARY EVENING of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.”

— Edith Wharton

365. “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed.”

— Edith Wharton

366. “He hasn’t written a line for twenty years.” “A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years?” Wade surprised him. “The real kind, I should say.”

— Edith Wharton

367. “Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt was always fastened by a small diamond stud. This display of opulence was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known that his easygoing habits and the demands of his large family frequently kept him what Starkfield called “behind.”

— Edith Wharton

368. “More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.”

— Edith Wharton

369. “Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man’s heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.”

— Edith Wharton

370. “No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity, and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power.”

— Edith Wharton

371. “You like so much to be alone?” “Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.”

— Edith Wharton

372. “His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.”

— Edith Wharton

373. “That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

— Edith Wharton

374. “He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.”

— Edith Wharton

375. “She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.”

— Edith Wharton

376. “He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante – so he had seen her from the first.”

— Edith Wharton

377. “No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.”

— Edith Wharton

378. “She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.”

— Edith Wharton

379. “Marry – but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.”

— Edith Wharton

380. “The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling, and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion.”

— Edith Wharton

381. “Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.”

— Edith Wharton

382. “Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.”

— Edith Wharton

383. “The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.”

— Edith Wharton

384. “All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain.”

— Edith Wharton

385. “What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming out ball.”

— Edith Wharton

386. “Since then there has been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings.”

— Edith Wharton

387. “It’s all stupid and narrow and unjust – but one can’t make over society.”

— Edith Wharton

388. “But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather’s whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.”

— Edith Wharton

389. “I wonder what her fate will be?’’ ‘‘What we’ve all contrived to make it,’’ he.”

— Edith Wharton

390. “She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted.”

— Edith Wharton

391. “Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.”

— Edith Wharton

392. “Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High Point.”

— Edith Wharton

393. “Passion,” the artist implied, would have been the dominant note of his life, had it not been held in check by a sentiment of exalted chivalry, and by the sense that a nature of such emotional intensity as his must always be “ridden on the curb.”

— Edith Wharton

394. “The extravagance in dress – ” Miss Jackson began. “Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them.”

— Edith Wharton

395. “The only way I can help you is by loving you,′ Selden said in a low voice.”

— Edith Wharton

396. “There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting fourth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.”

— Edith Wharton

397. “Archer’s New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.”

— Edith Wharton

398. “Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one’s sleeves and go down into the muck.”

— Edith Wharton

399. “Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.”

— Edith Wharton

400. “Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.”

— Edith Wharton