Edith Wharton - Life Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Edith Wharton
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

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
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 was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

Edith Wharton
It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

Edith Wharton
Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edith Wharton
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

Edith Wharton
I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.

Edith Wharton
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

Edith Wharton
Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Edith Wharton