Quotes from Edith Wharton

Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.

Perhaps, if I hadn't been, once before—I mean, if I'd always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end." Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. "I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

Well—it had all grown out of the other choice she had made when, years ago, she had said: "Thy gods shall not be my gods." And now she but dimly guessed who their gods were. At the moment when her very life depended on her knowing their passwords, holding the clue to their labyrinth, she stood outside the mysterious circle and vainly groped for a way in.

It was the old New York way, of taking life 'without effusion of blood''; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

You like so much to be alone? Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely. She

Lily laughed. "Merci du compliment!

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of limes.

Every one knows you're a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you're not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.

Cât de mult se vor putea cunoaÈ™te unul pe altul, când datoria lui de om cumsecade era s? nu-i dest?inuie trecutul, iar a ei, ca fat? de m?ritat, s? nu aib? nici un fel de trecut de ascuns?

e o fat? delicioas?: n-am mai v?zut o a doua fiin?? atât de deÈ™teapt? È™i de dragu??. EÈ™ti tare îndr?gostit de ea? Newland Archer râse roÈ™ind: - Cât poate fi un b?rbat.

They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can't say as they've hurried much to make our acquaintance.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

E ora mea favorit?... nu e ?i a dumitale?

And if you can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, & if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don't speak, it's because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur (Joslin 20).

But, my dear, it's just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It's because we know we can't hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.

The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim.

He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.

Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.

It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph—to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed.

Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High Point.