Quotes by Edith Wharton

What novels did you read when you were young, dear? Im convinced it all turns on that.

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

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

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.

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

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.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wifes 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 Mays pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

If youre as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?Oh, it still has its uses. One couldnt be divorced without it.

He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.

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.

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 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? Isnt it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?

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

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches

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.

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

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

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom to act which never made for romance. The strident setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of the Riviera Notes, emphasized the ideals of a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame.

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.