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Edith Wharton Quotes
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Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton combined an insider's view of American aristocracy with a powerful prose style. Her novels and short stories realistically portrayed the lives and morals of the late nineteenth century, an era of decline and faded wealth. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921, and was the first woman to receive this honor. Wharton was acquainted with many of the well-known people of her day, both in America and in Europe, including President Theodore Roosevelt.

✵ 24. January 1862 – 11. August 1937   •   Other names Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Edith Wharton photo
Edith Wharton: 103   quotes 6   likes

Edith Wharton Quotes

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

People

“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”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

“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.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

Life , Flowers , Despair

“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.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

“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.”

Edith Wharton
Indifference

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

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

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

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: "The House of Mirth" http://books.google.com/books?id=plFdLlYHwZ8C&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=No+insect+hangs+its+nest+on+threads+as+frail+as+those+which+will+sustain+the+weight+of+human+vanity.&source=bl&ots=j0EPPhjIZW&sig=MQMjyNy5yKK97Ok4bGqRWfC3obE&hl=en&ei=T5F0TMqyMIuisAOczpyMBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=No%20insect%20hangs%20its%20nest%20on%20threads%20as%20frail%20as%20those%20which%20will%20sustain%20the%20weight%20of%20human%20vanity.&f=false (1905), ch. X, pg. 69

“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.”

Edith Wharton

Source: Xingu and other Stories

“How I hate everything!”

Edith Wharton Summer

Source: Summer

Hate

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

Edith Wharton book Ethan Frome

Source: Ethan Frome

“… It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

“What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”

Edith Wharton
Beauty , Sense

“I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.”

Edith Wharton

Letter to Upton Sinclair (19 August 1927)

“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,
Old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”

Edith Wharton

Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road" http://www.bartleby.com/142/82., 12, Leaves of Grass (1855)
Misattributed

Death , Age , Freedom , Universe

“Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?”

Edith Wharton

Nadine Gordimer, "The Essential Gesture: Writers and Responsibility" http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/gordimer85.pdf, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan (12 October 1984), p. 9
Misattributed

Art , Thinking , Freedom

“There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.”

Edith Wharton

"A First Word"
A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934)

Age

“Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.”

Edith Wharton

"Xingu" http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/books/xingu.htm (1911), from Xingu and Other Stories (1916)

“When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.”

Edith Wharton

The Children http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400741.txt (1928), ch. XXV

People , Time

“In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 31

Season

“True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.”

Edith Wharton

The Writing of Fiction (1925), ch. I

“It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.”

Edith Wharton

Sanctuary http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/books/snctr10.txt, (1903) part II, ch. IV

Life , Wisdom , Parting , Personality

“How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?”

Edith Wharton

Letter to Barrett Wendell (19 July 1919)

Thinking , Country

“I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.”

Edith Wharton

Source: A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934), Ch. 3

Children , Books , Reading

“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

Edith Wharton

The Writing of Fiction (1925), ch. I

Art

“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”

Edith Wharton

"A First Word"
A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934)

“The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 34

“To James's intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.”

Edith Wharton

Source: A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934), Ch. 8

“He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. That is how she looks when she is alone! had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

"The House of Mirth" http://www.readprint.com/chapter-10542/The-House-of-Mirth-Edith-Wharton (1905), bk. 1, ch. 6

Beauty , Change

“After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist — or exist in a less measure.”

Edith Wharton

Letter to Robert Grant (19 November 1907)

“I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.”

Edith Wharton

Letter to John Hugh Smith (12 February 1909), published in The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988)

Pain , Marriage

“A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.”

Edith Wharton

"The Other Two," ch. 1, from The Descent of Man and Other Stories http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/tdmos10.txt (1904)