Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

416. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

418. “What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?”

— Edith Wharton

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

430. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

436. “The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.”

— Edith Wharton

437. “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

438. “It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.”

— Edith Wharton

439. “All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people’s eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector’s Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless’s “afternoons”.”

— Edith Wharton

440. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

442. “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

443. “Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”

— Edith Wharton

444. “But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop.”

— Edith Wharton

445. “But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming guard about her.”

— Edith Wharton

446. “The February day was closing, and a ray of sunshine, slanting through a slit in the chapel wall, brought out the vision of a pale haloed head floating against the dusky background of the chancel like a water-lily on its leaf.”

— Edith Wharton

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances. When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms.”

— Edith Wharton