Quotes from Edith Wharton

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

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

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

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

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

I suppose 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.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.