Quotes from Edith Wharton

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

though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.

Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands - and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

I can't love you unless I give you up.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

She sang, of course, M'ama! and not he loves me, since 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.

I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

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.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.' Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.