Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

Her child was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet.

Edith Wharton
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.

Edith Wharton
The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Edith Wharton
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.

Edith Wharton
For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

Edith Wharton
She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.

Edith Wharton
I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

Edith Wharton
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

Edith Wharton
I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.

Edith Wharton
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Edith Wharton
It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.

Edith Wharton
Every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Edith Wharton
Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.

Edith Wharton
I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.

Edith Wharton
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Edith Wharton
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

Edith Wharton
For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

Edith Wharton
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

Edith Wharton
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.

Edith Wharton
The sunshine had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the landscape of a missal.

Edith Wharton
When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Edith Wharton
She took up the thread of her mild chat and carried it on at the same pace as her knitting. Her conversation resembled the large loose-stranded web between her fingers: now and then she dropped a stitch, and went on regardless of the gap in the pattern.

Edith Wharton
I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

Edith Wharton
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

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

Edith Wharton
She had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

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

Edith Wharton