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Edith Wharton Quotes | Quotes said by Edith Wharton

  • Edith Wharton Quote #1

    ...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

  • Edith Wharton Quote #2

    ...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?

  • Edith Wharton Quote #3

    ...they who exchange their independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is not gold that glitters...

    ...Es gibi tatli bir kelime karsiliginda özgürlüklerinden vazgeçenler, parlayan her seyin altin olmadigini görmeye hazirlikli olmalidirlar...

  • Edith Wharton Quote #4

    ...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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #5

    ..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #6

    [...] the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?

  • Edith Wharton Quote #7

    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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #8

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

  • Edith Wharton Quote #9

    A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #10

    A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #11

    Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #12

    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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #13

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

  • Edith Wharton Quote #14

    Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #15

    Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #16

    Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #17

    As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #18

    As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

  • Edith Wharton Quote #19

    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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #20

    Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #21

    But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #22

    But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #23

    Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #24

    Do you know, I began 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. We’ve been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #25

    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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #26

    Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

  • Edith Wharton Quote #27

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

  • Edith Wharton Quote #28

    Each time you happen to me all over again.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #29

    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.

  • Edith Wharton Quote #30

    Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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