Edith Wharton Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

“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.”

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

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

“Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.”

“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.”

“I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.”

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

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

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

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe.”

“It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”

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

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.”

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

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

“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

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

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

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”

“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.”

“I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.”

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

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

“Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.”

“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.”

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

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”

“It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”

“Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.”

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

“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.”

“… 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.”

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

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”

“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.”

“… 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.”

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

“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.”

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

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

“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.”

“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“… In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers…”

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

“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.”

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

“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.”

“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

“I can't love you unless I give you up.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”