Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Nick had secretly wearied, if not of his wife, at least of the life that their marriage compelled him to lead. His passion was not strong enough-had never been strong enough – to outweigh his prejudices, scruples, principles, or whatever one chose to call them. Susy’s dignity might go up like tinder in the blaze of her love; but his was made of a less combustible substance.”

— Edith Wharton

402. “You’ve arranged it delightfully,’ he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.”

— Edith Wharton

403. “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

404. “Mrs. Fairford smiled. “I’ve sometimes thought,” she mused, “that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he’s the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman – and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.”

— Edith Wharton

405. “The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it seemed, understood without knowing.”

— Edith Wharton

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.”

— Edith Wharton

409. “Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given point in a sentimental relation;.”

— Edith Wharton

410. “Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”

— Edith Wharton

411. “Not for the world would he have made a significant to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.”

— Edith Wharton

412. “Yes, he would be kind – kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate.”

— Edith Wharton

413. “Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette.”

— Edith Wharton

414. “He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world’s estimate, how little that was!”

— Edith Wharton

415. “The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

426. “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

427. “To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.”

— Edith Wharton

428. “He started to walk across the Common, and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a gray silk sunshade over her head – how could he have ever imagined her with a pink one?”

— Edith Wharton

429. “The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.”

— Edith Wharton

430. “The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.”

— Edith Wharton

431. “Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?”

— Edith Wharton

432. “It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to – this.”

— Edith Wharton

433. “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

434. “He had no desire to marry at all – that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now –.”

— Edith Wharton

435. “Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.”

— Edith Wharton

436. “Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before – I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.” Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

— Edith Wharton

437. “Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.”

— Edith Wharton

438. “Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.”

— Edith Wharton

439. “It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow.”

— Edith Wharton

440. “The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in – two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.”

— Edith Wharton

441. “The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.”

— Edith Wharton

442. “She herself was large and saturnine, with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone to which the clue was lost.”

— Edith Wharton

443. “I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts – I hate ugliness, you know.”

— Edith Wharton

444. “Was she beautiful – or was she only someone apart?”

— Edith Wharton

445. “She read it over and shivered. Not one word of their past-not one allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their lives which had enclosed them in the other like the flower in its sheath! What place had such memories in such a letter?”

— Edith Wharton

446. “In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger.”

— Edith Wharton

447. “He had seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted – that she was sick to death of being alone with him. He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers on the steep above them. After all there was nothing sudden in his discovery. For.”

— Edith Wharton

448. “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You’re so shy, and yet you’re so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again – or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.”

— Edith Wharton

449. “Yesterday her fancy had fluttered free pinions above a choice of occupations; now she had to drop to the level of the familiar routine, in which moments of seeming brilliancy and freedom alternated with long hours of subjection.”

— Edith Wharton

450. “What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?”

— Edith Wharton