Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Edith Wharton
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

Edith Wharton
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

Edith Wharton
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Edith Wharton
There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.

Edith Wharton
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

Edith Wharton
Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

Edith Wharton
And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

Edith Wharton
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.

Edith Wharton
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

Edith Wharton
And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them...

Edith Wharton
He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.

Edith Wharton
I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.

Edith Wharton
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Edith Wharton
Oh, the critic who asks for a reprieve has already formed his opinion.

Edith Wharton
A walk through the Paris streets was always like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which countless stored fragrances were shaken out.

Edith Wharton
Like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting.

Edith Wharton
She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

Edith Wharton
Before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.

Edith Wharton
The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

Edith Wharton
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

Edith Wharton
He was a man who grew fat on resentment as others did on happiness.

Edith Wharton
As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

Edith Wharton