Quotes from Edith Wharton

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.

There is nothing like a Revolution for making people conservative.

Granice was overcome by the futility of any further attempt to inculpate himself. He was chained to life - a 'prisoner of consciousness'.

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys' was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and inimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room to spare on those waters for all our separate ventures; and always, beyond the sunset, a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows were bent.

But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.

she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.

and strolled into the other room.

Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.

A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.

The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one's individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman's scream at an accident she isn't in.

Bilo je toliko o?igledno da je ona žrtva civilizacije koja ju je stvorila, da su karike njene narukvice delovale kao okovi koji je vezuju za njenu sudbinu.

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

When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.

His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpaired the freshness of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vast and consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the enjoyment of life, instead of being forced into grudging concessions to the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them in unenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York.

I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense!

Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection

Don't judge us too harshly—or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual—we think only of the family.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts." -The Decoration of Houses

If love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against appetite.

îÈ™i d?duse seama c? fusese obiÈ™nuit s? vad? în c?s?torie un liman sigur, când de fapt era mai degrab? o peregrinare pe m?ri necunoscute.

It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life. Some day

She could only gather, from the silences and evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up—a woman who was of course dreadful, and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been promptly discredited.