Quotes from Edith Wharton

bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate...happens to me on a daily basis!

no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.

Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically: Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of spending it--

Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.

I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit.

The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry 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.

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.

But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.

She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.

And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?

He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.

His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

Once—twice—you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake—I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I understood. 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 have lived on—don't take it from me now!

Jack Stepney had once said of Miss Van Osburgh that she was as reliable as roast mutton. His own taste was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable, and there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been reduced to a crust.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free;

Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

He pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at it's centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests.

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!