Edith Wharton Quotes

230 Sourced Quotes

Stop running around 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
Oh, the critic who asks for a reprieve has already formed his opinion.

Edith Wharton
Ah, good conversation—there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Edith Wharton
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

Edith Wharton
Life is always either a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me the featherbed.

Edith Wharton
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

Edith Wharton
She had learned that a woman of her age, however conspicuous her past, and whatever her present claims to notice, is fated to pass unremarked in a society where youth so undisputedly rules.

Edith Wharton
There are lots of ways of answering a letter — and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Edith Wharton
He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

Edith Wharton
It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Edith Wharton
She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Edith Wharton
In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

Edith Wharton
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

Edith Wharton
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.

Edith Wharton
Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

Edith Wharton
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton
If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was sure of her ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to feel that the only problems she could not solve were those with which she was familiar.

Edith Wharton
I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self.

Edith Wharton
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

Edith Wharton
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist — or exist in a less measure.

Edith Wharton
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton