Quotes from Edith Wharton

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

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 above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony, and order.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.

In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.

I often wonder whether a frumpy old woman can ever be quite fair in her estimate of a young and lovely one.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

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.

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always succumbed to "complications."

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.