Edith Wharton citations

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”

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

“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?”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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