Edith Wharton: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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”

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”

“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.”

“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.”

“How I hate everything!”

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.”