Quotes from Edith Wharton

The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger

All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility and Archer groaned out again: I dont understand you!

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's only means of quick communication! "Chicago wants you.

He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again

I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.

Few as they had been, they were thick with memories.

It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful.

She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?

Its more real to me here than if I went up, he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other

The only way I can help you is by loving you,' Selden said in a low voice.

Cuando estamos separados y deseo verte, cada pensamiento se consume en una gran llama... entonces llegad, y eres tanto más de lo que recordaba, y lo que quiero de ti tanto más que una hora o dos de vez en cuando, con desiertos de sedienta espera en los intervalos, que soy perfectamente capaz de quedarme quieto a tu lado, como ahora, simplemente confiando con tranquilidad en que todo llegará a ser real.

The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling, and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion.

Chi ama le idee non è destinato a morire di fame.

He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

she hated the thought of it as one more instance of the perverseness with which things she was entitled to always came to her as if they had been stolen.

But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop

But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.

It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth—Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it "right off." And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...

She's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph

That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seeds, but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest, she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.

Mrs. Fairford smiled. "I've sometimes thought," she mused, "that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he's the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman—and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.