Quotes from Edith Wharton

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

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

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

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

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

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.

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

I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's center of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

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.

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.

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

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.

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.

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.