Quotes from Edith Wharton

Norton was supremely gifted as an awakener, and no thoughtful mind can recall without a thrill the notes of the first voice which has called it out of its morning dream.

Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad

the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.

W]hat with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business. But Newport represented the escape from duty...

Ethan's love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things.

But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.

In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.

to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

The stage was thought to have a shaping influence, for the most part a bad one, on youthful character and conduct in much the way television is thought to have in our day.

You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all.

even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall.

There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had placed one by one in enviable niches of existence!

What do you call the weak point? He paused. The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

Only, I wonder - the thing one's so certain of in advance; can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

Odbacila sam par dobrih prilika na samom po?etku – pretpostavljam da to svaka devojka uradi, a znate da sam vrlo siromašna – i vrlo skupa.

Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of

And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn't got it himself?

You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence?