Quotes from Edith Wharton

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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.

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

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.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

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

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

I can't love you unless I give you up.

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.