Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You’re right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.”

— Edith Wharton

402. “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

403. “Every one knows you’re a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you’re not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.”

— Edith Wharton

404. “He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.”

— Edith Wharton

405. “He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But I’ve caught it already. I am dead – I’ve been dead for months and months.”

— Edith Wharton

406. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

408. “But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.”

— Edith Wharton

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

415. “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

416. “Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.”

— Edith Wharton

417. “Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”

— Edith Wharton

418. “That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.”

— Edith Wharton

419. “She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to be beautiful.”

— Edith Wharton

420. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

422. “Courage is about the most useful thing in an artist’s outfit.”

— Edith Wharton

423. “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

424. “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

425. “If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.”

— Edith Wharton

426. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

428. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

430. “All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.”

— Edith Wharton

431. “During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one’s feet.”

— Edith Wharton

432. “Because I – because I want to fell you holding me,” he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.”

— Edith Wharton

433. “At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.”

— Edith Wharton

434. “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

435. “Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy.”

— Edith Wharton

436. “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

437. “She stared, perhaps suspecting irony, as she always did beneath the unintelligible.”

— Edith Wharton

438. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

440. “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

441. “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

442. “The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s only means of quick communication! “Chicago wants you.”

— Edith Wharton

443. “Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.”

— Edith Wharton

444. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

446. “She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.”

— Edith Wharton

447. “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

449. “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

450. “There were moments of overwhelming lassitude, when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.”

— Edith Wharton