Edith Wharton Quotes

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") ~ Edith Wharton

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

Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her
of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated
he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch. ~ Edith Wharton

And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!"
He paused a moment. "Come up and see," he suggested. "I can give you a cup of tea in no time - and you won't meet any bores."
Her colour deepened - she still had the art of blushing at the right time - but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.
"Why not? It's too tempting - I'll take the risk," she declared.
"Oh, I'm not dangerous," he said in the same key.
In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent. ~ Edith Wharton

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression. ~ Edith Wharton

James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river'. ~ Edith Wharton

Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress. ~ Edith Wharton

The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing. ~ Edith Wharton

She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story. ~ Edith Wharton

Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. ~ Edith Wharton

This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception. ~ Mark Bostridge

Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. ~ Edith Wharton

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth! ~ Edith Wharton

The allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a SPEAKING silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies. ~ Edith Wharton

Any rapidly enacted episode ... should be seen through only one pair of eyes. ~ Edith Wharton

Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad ~ Edith Wharton

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante. ~ Edith Wharton

This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea. In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome. Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save? Where was Saint Francis's devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty? Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation. Odo listened with a saddened heart, thinking, as he followed his host through the perfumed shade of the gardens, and down ~ Edith Wharton

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed. ~ 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. ~Lilly Bart ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

But these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion ... ("Afterward") ~ Edith Wharton

Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did. ~ Edith Wharton

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

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. ~ Edith Wharton

It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

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

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. ~ Edith Wharton

Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under. ~ Edith Wharton

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making. ~ Edith Wharton

Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing. ~ Edith Wharton

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

Even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump. ~ Edith Wharton

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

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. ~ Edith Wharton

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will. ~ Edith Wharton

I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.' ~ Ken Follett

All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth. ~ Edith Wharton

Well
there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents and her half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield. ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement - he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations. ~ Edith Wharton

You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! ~ Edith Wharton

The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple. ~ Edith Wharton

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars ~ Edith Wharton

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... ~ 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

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

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an over-mastering longing to be with her again. ~ Edith Wharton

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events. ~ Edith Wharton

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

Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed. ~ Edith Wharton

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

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts. -The Decoration of Houses ~ Edith Wharton

But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms. ~ Edith Wharton

Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements ~ Edith Wharton

including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ~ Kate Bolick

[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! ~ Edith Wharton

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it. ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

Life is made up of compromises. ~ Edith Wharton

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels. ~ Edith Wharton

She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air. ~ Edith Wharton

In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers ... ~ Edith Wharton

I am secretly afraid of animals ... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us. ~ Edith Wharton

But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power. (Newland Archer of Countess Olenska) ~ Edith Wharton

The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. ~ Edith Wharton

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the 'younger set,' in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it. If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but he was content to hold his view without analyzing it, since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system. In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than a ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

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 ... ~ Edith Wharton

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it. ~ Edith Wharton

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

She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations - but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her. Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own powerlessness to contend with them. ~ Edith Wharton

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor's famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico's. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf's, Tiffany's. ~ Melanie Benjamin

Your coat's a little shabby - but who cares? It doesn't keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop - and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. ~ Edith Wharton

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness
too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth. ~ Edith Wharton

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life? ~ Edith Wharton

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

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her. ~ 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

Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there. ~ Edith Wharton

Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; ~ Edith Wharton

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything. ~ Edith Wharton

You? - his words overwhelmed him with a realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the very moment of attainment. Yes - he had always feared his fate, and he was too honest to disown his cowardice now; ~ Edith Wharton

But you'll get it back-you'll get it all back, with your face... ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

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. ~ Edith Wharton

For she was really too lovely
too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished
and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow's-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and chatted? but then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments ... ~ Edith Wharton

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 ~ 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 wit ~ Edith Wharton

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write. ~ Edith Wharton

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone ~ Edith Wharton

I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids ... ~ Edith Wharton

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity ...
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo. ~ Edith Wharton

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion. ~ Edith Wharton

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful. ~ Edith Wharton

A tremor of apprehension encircled the room. None of the ladies required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals; but when they were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from the "Encyclopedia Brittanica," the "Reader's Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as something vaguely pagan. ~ Edith Wharton

I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit. ~ Edith Wharton

But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true. ~ Edith Wharton