Quotes by Edith Wharton

“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?”

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”

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 ones self, the very meaning of ones soul.

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

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

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.

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

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. The House of Mirth

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

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

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.

High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is not--but the flowOf vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,Poured from the far worlds flaming boundariesIn waxing tides of unimagined glow.And to that height illumined of the mindhe calls us still by the familiar way,Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,Befogged in failure, chilled with loves decay--Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,How on the heights is day and still more day.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

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

Some men, Flamel irresistibly added, think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. Im between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.

You mustnt tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other peoples dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!

I dont want them to think that we dress like savages, she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.Its their armour, he thought, their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it. And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

The whole truth? Miss Bart laughed. What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, its the story thats easiest to believe. In this case its a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorsets story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and its convenient to be on good terms with her

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.