Edith wharton quotes

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

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.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Some things are best mended by a break.

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.

The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

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.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

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.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

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

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

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

It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

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.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

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

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.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

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

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

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.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

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.

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.

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. 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.

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

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.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

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.

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.

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.

I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

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.

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

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.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

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.

And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

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

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.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

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.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.

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.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

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.

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?

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.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.

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

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

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

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

Life is made up of compromises.

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

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.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.