Quotes from Edith Wharton

the only cheap life was a dull life.

one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.

It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that followed--while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled the spoon in his cup--Susy remembered what she had seen through the circle of Nick's kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls.

Because I - because I want to fell you holding me, he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

Uma coisa ele sabia que tinha perdido: a flor da vida. Mas pensava nela como uma coisa tão inantingível e improvável que lamentar-se seria como desesperar porque não se ganhou o primeiro prémio da lotaria. Havia cem milhões de bilhetes na sua lotaria e só um prémio. As chances foram todas definitivamente contra ele.

Because I - because I want to feel you holding me, he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in—two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

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.

His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts at his heels.

A sua afirmação - as mulheres deviam ser livres, livres como nós - ia até ao fundo de um problema que no seu mundo se convencionara não existir. Boas mulheres, embora injustiçadas, nunca exigiriam o género de liberdade que ele pensava, e homens de espírito generoso como ele ficavam - assim no calor do argumento - cavalheirescamente prontos para conceder-lha.

I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters

It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.

There were moments of overwhelming lassitude, when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.

Mereu aceeaÈ™i platitudine È™i lips? de relief, aceeaÈ™i uniformitate a m??tii americane, cu expresia ei de dr?g?l??enie inofensiv?. … Chipurile lor sem?nau cu acele peisaje din Vestul Mijlociu, cu acei nesfârÈ™iÈ›i kilometri de lanuri de grâu care separ? între ele dou? staÈ›ii de cale ferat?.

That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods . .

For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.

I didn't know Countesses were so neighborly.

Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck.

To me the only death is monotony.

You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.

as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books

To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.