Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.”

— Edith Wharton

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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. “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

363. “You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented? No woman ever knows she’s discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I’ve seen smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership.”

— 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. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

367. “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

368. “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

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. “Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?”

— Edith Wharton

371. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

374. “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

375. “Undine Spragg – how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.”

— Edith Wharton

376. “It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful.”

— Edith Wharton

377. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

384. “Newland never seems to look ahead,” Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: “No; but you see it doesn’t matter, because when there’s nothing particular to do he reads a book.”

— Edith Wharton

385. “I am horribly poor – and very expensive.”

— Edith Wharton

386. “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

387. “How impatience men are! All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time.”

— Edith Wharton

388. “You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they’re breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

390. “You’ve put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.”

— Edith Wharton

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”

— Edith Wharton

394. “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

395. “I don’t suppose, dear, you’re really defending the French Sunday?”

— Edith Wharton

396. “Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.”

— Edith Wharton

397. “And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave – a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He.”

— Edith Wharton

398. “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

399. “It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph – to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed.”

— Edith Wharton

400. “In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer’s belief that when “such things happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.”

— Edith Wharton