Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 2

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...

...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?

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 philosophically 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. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

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

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.

Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up.

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.

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.

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

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

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. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

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

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.

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

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, the very meaning of one's soul.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

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

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.

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

High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is not--but the flowOf vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,Poured from the far world's flaming boundariesIn waxing tides of unimagined glow.And to that height illumined of the mindhe calls us still by the familiar way,Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay--Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,How on the heights is day and still more day.

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

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

His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.

What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.

Do you know, I began 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. We’ve been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.

They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewel were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces – the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The glow of the stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine. More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

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.

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.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need – as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. "The House of Mirth