Quotes from Edith Wharton

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.

It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.

But you'll get it back-you'll get it all back, with your face...

What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader's mind just as it left the writer's -- without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought -- it has been read to no purpose.

It's a hundred years since we've met - it may be another hundred before we meet again.

he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!

Xingu! she scoffed. Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!

But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power. (Newland Archer of Countess Olenska)

But they're too shy to speak when my mother-in-law doesn't; sometimes they open their mouths to begin, but they never get as far as the first sentence. You must get used to an ocean of silence, and just swim about in it as well as you can.

She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty, towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty, who could only falter out: Lily, Lily-- how can you laugh about such things? So as not to weep, perhaps. But no-- I'm not of the tearful order. I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

The world] is not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms - and above all, my dear, not alone!

Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

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.

She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.

individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ''inscrutable.

Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!

She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.

Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?

That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

She had once more shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.

But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.