Edith Wharton Quotations

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

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

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

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

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

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

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

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

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

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

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.

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.

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

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled.

If we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities... I mean, each woman's right to her liberty.

Though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffebly tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.

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

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.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. 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 still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

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.

And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands - and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

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.

Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.' Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

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.

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

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

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

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 despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

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

...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

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.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

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.

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.

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.

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.

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

...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.

How I hate everything!

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

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

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.

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.

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

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.

Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.

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.

Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.

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

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

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.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

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.

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

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.