Edith Wharton quotes - page 3

Edith Wharton was an American novelist and short story writer, renowned for her incisive portrayals of social class and manners. Her works often explore the constraints of society and the complexities of human relationships, with novels like "The Age of Innocence" and "Ethan Frome" considered classics. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remains a major figure in American literature. Here are 138 of her quotes:

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.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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

Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.

Edith Wharton

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.

Edith Wharton

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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

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.

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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

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

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

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton