Quotes from Edith Wharton

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

Toward Florence he was specially drawn by the fact that Alfieri now lived there; but, as often happens after such separations, the reunion was a disappointment. Alfieri, indeed, warmly welcomed his friend; but he was engrossed in his dawning passion for the Countess of Albany, and

Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Juila was wounded in every fiber of her spirit.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive ...

Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

He was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole.

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

It isn't that she's given me to you--it is that she's given you to yourself... Don't you see... that that's the gift you can't escape from, the debt you're pledged to acquit? Don't you see that you've never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she's made you into the man she loved? That's worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman--that's the gift she would have wished to give!

It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally remained uninvited. The diet would have disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to the other guests.

He had to the full the courage of his lack of convictions.

He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.

It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.

even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion.

If the collective life which results from our individual money-making is not richer, more interesting and more stimulating than that of countries where the individual effort is less intense, then it looks as if there were something wrong about our method.

It's 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.

You idiot! said his wife, and threw down her cards.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's center of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone." ? Edith Wharton

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.

Miss Corby's role was jocularity. She always entered the conversation with a handspring.

All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.

fusese totdeauna dispus s? cread? c? hazardul È™i împrejur?rile jucau un rol minor în soarta oamenilor, în comparaÈ›ie cu înclinaÈ›ia lor înn?scut? de a-È™i f?uri singuri soarta.