Quotes from Edith Wharton

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.

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.

and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!

The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

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

Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

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

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

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

I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself

it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life

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

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches