Edith Wharton - People Quotes

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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

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

Edith Wharton
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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

Edith Wharton
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

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

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
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
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
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
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

Edith Wharton
The Atlantic's too big for me. A creek's got more of the sea in it, for people who want to turn it into poetry.

Edith Wharton
And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them...

Edith Wharton
What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

Edith Wharton
Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

Edith Wharton