Edith Wharton quotes - page 5

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:

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.

Edith Wharton

Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.

Edith Wharton

... It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Edith Wharton

It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

Edith Wharton

He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. That is how she looks when she is alone! had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced.

Edith Wharton

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist - or exist in a less measure.

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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.

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton

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

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.

Edith Wharton

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our ''gross public'' to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth.

Edith Wharton

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Edith Wharton

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.

Edith Wharton

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.

Edith Wharton

The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.

Edith Wharton

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

Edith Wharton

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

Edith Wharton

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

Edith Wharton