Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton
Even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Edith Wharton
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Edith Wharton
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

Edith Wharton
I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them — children, duties, visits, bores, relations — the things that protect married people from each other.

Edith Wharton
I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

Edith Wharton
In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

Edith Wharton
What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

Edith Wharton
In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.

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
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.

Edith Wharton
I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

Edith Wharton
Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

Edith Wharton
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Edith Wharton
'You must write,' she said, administering the most exquisite flattery that human lips could give.

Edith Wharton
Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.

Edith Wharton
Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-depreciation.

Edith Wharton
Traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

Edith Wharton
She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape that she knew.

Edith Wharton
Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

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
There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

Edith Wharton
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

Edith Wharton
The ages are but baubles hung upon
The thread of some strong lives — and one slight wrist
May lift a century above the dust.

Edith Wharton