Quotes from Edith Wharton

plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

The conventionality of the tribe is far more important than the happiness of the individual. In fact, the happiness of the individual ideally should rest in perpetrating the conventionality of the tribe.

the things that she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.

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.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.

But I've caught it already. I am dead — I've been dead for months and months.

Meanwhile everything matters — that concerns you.

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world's estimate, how little that was!

But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided.

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.

Não é verdade, monsieur, que o grande valor está em manter a própria liberdade intelectual, em não escravizar o nosso poder de apreciação, a nossa independência crítica?

no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.

She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause

In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.

a frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.

and he was struck again by the religious revernce of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress. 'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.

He remembered once hearing his grandmother... say plaintively: Why daughter, I presume I can go without -- BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE.

After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles, he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.

He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...

He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.