Edith Wharton Quotes

She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.

...they who exchange their independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is not gold that glitters...

...Eş gibi tatlı bir kelime karşılığında özgürlüklerinden vazgeçenler, parlayan her şeyin altın olmadığını görmeye hazırlıklı olmalıdırlar...

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.

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

He wonders whether young women raised under such restrictive conditions can ever overcome the disadvantage of deliberately engineered lacunae in their mental, moral, and emotional development. The

I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: 'Please give me Edith Wharton's book'; and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read!

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of color you are using today.

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.

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.

My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing with their own households. Men and women equally, when they have the range of interests that real cultivation gives, need the stimulus of different points of view, the refreshment of new ideas as well as of new faces. The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America.

Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:
'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.

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 wit

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.

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

Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

...she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

Don't let us be like all the others! she protested.

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

[The world] is not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms - and above all, my dear, not alone!

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

But she had the awful gift of omnipresence, of exercising her influence from a distance; so that while the old family friends and visitors at Longlands said, "It's wonderful, now tactful Blanche is - how she keeps out of the young people's way," every member of the household, from its master to the last boots and scullion and gardener's boy, knew that Her Grace's eyes was on them all.

But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life.

It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ... any more than these little things that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'"
"Yes, but meanwhile -"
"Ah, meanwhile -

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.

What do you call the weak point?" He paused. "The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.

Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired.

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

Meanwhile the old Marquess, visibly moved, was charging Odo to respect his elders and superiors, while in the same breath warning him not to take up with the Frenchified notions of the court, but to remember that for a lad of his condition the chief virtues were a tight seat in the saddle, a quick hand on the sword and a slow tongue in counsel. "Mind your own business," he concluded, "and see that others mind theirs." The Marchioness thereupon, with many tears, hung a

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.

She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.

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.

There are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities.

But I've caught it already. I am dead - I've been dead for months and months.

Something in truth lay dead between them - the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

The longed-for ships come empty home, founder on the deep
And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth upon the world. But how many generations of the women of had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

It's more real to me here than if I went up, he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

After all, marriage is marriage, and money's money - both useful things in their way ...

Cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

Culture! Yes - if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of - well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ...

And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.
("The Triumph Of The Night")

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

Their bewilderment is so great that, when one of the girls spoke of archery clubs being fashionable in the States, somebody blurted out: "I suppose the Indians taught you?"; and I am constantly expecting to ask Mrs. St. George how she heats her wigwam in winter.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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

...the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.

There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.

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.

I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.

'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,

Bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate ... happens to me on a daily basis!

How I hate everything!

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

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things ... I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

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

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.

She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an in an inarticulate well-being.

The same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. 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. Of the points in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects.

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.

Odo in fact owed his first acquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervals of his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin laden with the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery. What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a skilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the accepted forms of thought. The

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt.

How I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim.

Once - twice - you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake - I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me - I understood. It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on - don't take it from me now!

That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.

But his
marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a
disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without
it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided. If
Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because
her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken
for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral
insouciance with Sheban elegance.

Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again - I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.

But, my dear, it's just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It's because we know we can't hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

These personages, grouped about the toilet-table where the Countess sat under the hands of a Parisian hairdresser, were picturesquely relieved against the stucco panelling and narrow mirrors of the apartment, with its windows looking on a garden set with mossy statues. To Odo, however, the scene suggested the most tedious part of his day's routine. The compliments to be exchanged, the silly verses to be praised, the gewgaws from Paris to be admired, were all contrasted in his mind with the vision of that other life which had come to him on the hillside of the Superga. On