Quotes from Edith Wharton

Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart?

The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest.

After all, there was good in the old ways.

Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his;

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.

Any personal entanglement might mean bother, and bother was the thing she most abhorred.

Undine leaned close enough for her lowered voice to reach him. 'Can't you understand that, knowing how they all feel about me and how Ralph feels - I'd give almost anything to get away?' Her father looked at her compassionately. 'I guess most of us feel that way once in a way when we're young, Undine. Later on you'll see going away ain't much use when you've got to turn around and come back.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

Newland never seems to look ahead, Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed

She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.

Todos vivían en una especie de mundo de acertijos, donde lo verdadero nunca se decía ni se hacía ni se pensaba.

Ethan, there's something wrong! I knew there was!" She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.

But in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all.

It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow.

The extravagance in dress—" Miss Jackson began. "Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry's dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them.

Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?

Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we're supposing about under any obligation to the other party - the one he was trying to buy the property from?' Ralph hesitated. 'Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.' Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest question.

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. If Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with Sheban elegance.

Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;

And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave—a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He