Edith Wharton Quotes

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

“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.”

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 1

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton Quotes about life

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

Source: The House of Mirth

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

Source: The Age of Innocence

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

Journal entry (March 1926)

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton Quotes about the trip

“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.”

Source: The Age of Innocence

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

"A First Word" <br class="br"> A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934)

“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.”

"Vesalius in Zante (1564)", in North American Review (November 1902), p. 631
Variant: There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

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

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 33

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

The House of Mirth http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/hmirt10.txt (1905), bk.1, ch. 6

Edith Wharton: Trending quotes

“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.”

Source: The House of Mirth

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

"Vesalius in Zante (1564)" http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/whartpoe2.htm#Vesalius%20in%20Zante.%20(1564), in North American Review (November 1902), p. 625 <br class="br">Source: Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses