Edith Wharton Quotes

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.

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

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

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

I suppose 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.

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

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.

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.