Quotes from Edith Wharton

Los más tradicionales le tenían cariño precisamente por ser pequeña e incómoda, lo que alejaba a los nuevos ricos a quienes Nueva York empezaba a temer, aunque, al mismo tiempo, le simpatizaban.

ON A JANUARY EVENING of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Por su parte, los sentimentales se aferraban a la Academia por sus reminiscencias históricas, y a su vez los melómanos la adoraban por su excelente acústica, una cualidad tan problemática en salas construidas para escuchar música.

It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters… any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: 'Use unknown.

He pulled the sash down and turned back. Catch my death! he echoed; and he felt like adding: But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months.

Not for the world would he have made a significant to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.

he had found her lips at last and was drinking unconsciousness of everything but the joy they gave him.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as

That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.

Društvo je nebesko telo koje se okre?e i treba ga procenjivati na osnovu mesta koje zauzima na nebu svakog pojedinca; a trenutno je svoju svetlost usmeravalo ka Lili.

She herself was large and saturnine, with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone to which the clue was lost.

Ali znate, nas dve smo toliko razli?ite: ona voli da bude dobra, a ja volim da budem sre?na.

It's waiting for us: it seems to know.

and with a shiver of foreboding 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.

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables.

Even when it's the other way round it ain't always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing's binding… and they say shipwrecked fellows'll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.

Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given point in a sentimental relation;

The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by "politicians" and "Westerners," two classes of citizens whom my mother's intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.

After all there was good in the old ways...there was good in the new order too.

Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, a gentleman couldn't go into politics. But