Quotes from Edith Wharton

My little old dog a heart-beat at my feet

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

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

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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

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.

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.