Edith Wharton citations

Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”