Quotes from Edith Wharton

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

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a literary salon; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Meanwhile the old Marquess, visibly moved, was charging Odo to respect his elders and superiors, while in the same breath warning him not to take up with the Frenchified notions of the court, but to remember that for a lad of his condition the chief virtues were a tight seat in the saddle, a quick hand on the sword and a slow tongue in counsel. Mind your own business, he concluded, and see that others mind theirs. The Marchioness thereupon, with many tears, hung a

Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day...

Each time you happen to me all over again

Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired.

Prin liniÈ™tea ei, din care lipsea orice nuan?? de surpriz?, prin simplitatea ei, izbutea s? înl?ture orice convenÈ›ie, f?cându-l s? înÈ›eleag? cât de firesc era, pentru doi vechi prieteni care aveau s?-È™i spun? atâtea, s? caute s? fie singuri.

Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in.... The visible is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still worm my hands thankfully by the old fire, through every year it is fed with the dry wood of more memories. --A Backward Glance

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

Life is made up of compromises.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

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