Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.

Edith Wharton
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back—your old self rejects you, and shuts you out.

Edith Wharton
He could now think about her calmly, recognizing that her course was run and that she would not have wished to outlive herself.

Edith Wharton
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on the seas.

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
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

Edith Wharton
Most wrong-doing works, on the whole, less mischief than its useless confession.

Edith Wharton
The spring of enthusiasm that used to give a momentary importance to the least event seemed to have run dry in her.

Edith Wharton
Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face.

Edith Wharton
Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.

Edith Wharton
He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

Edith Wharton
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

Edith Wharton
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

Edith Wharton
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

Edith Wharton
It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Edith Wharton
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

Edith Wharton
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

Edith Wharton
There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Edith Wharton
Whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

Edith Wharton
Cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget.

Edith Wharton
His mind had been receptive up to a certain age, and then had snapped shut on what it possessed, like a replete crustacean never reached by another high tide. People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive.

Edith Wharton
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always succumbed to "complications."

Edith Wharton
To be with her was like living in a room with shuttered windows.

Edith Wharton
Ah, perhaps it was true — perhaps she did not know how to bear happiness. It took her by the inmost fibers, burned through her like a fever, was going to give her no rest, no peace, no time to steady and tame it in her dancing soul.

Edith Wharton
I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

Edith Wharton
With Mrs. Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo. She kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile, and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said.

Edith Wharton
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

Edith Wharton
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

Edith Wharton
Their prejudices reminded him of sign-posts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude.

Edith Wharton
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

Edith Wharton