Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

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

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
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

Edith Wharton
He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

Edith Wharton
There are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

Edith Wharton
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

Edith Wharton
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Edith Wharton
We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

Edith Wharton
To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Edith Wharton
One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

Edith Wharton
'Ah,' said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar.

Edith Wharton
Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

Edith Wharton
The longed-for ships
Come empty home or founder on the deep,
And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.

Edith Wharton
There are moments when a man's imagination so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

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

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

Edith Wharton
There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

Edith Wharton
The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony, and order.

Edith Wharton
People left him to his sorrow as a man is left to an incurable habit, an unfortunate tie: they ignored it, or looked over its head if they happened to catch a glimpse of it at his elbow.

Edith Wharton
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

Edith Wharton
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

Edith Wharton
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

Edith Wharton
Though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

Edith Wharton
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

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

Edith Wharton
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.

Edith Wharton
Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

Edith Wharton