Quotes from Edith Wharton

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

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

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

but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

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.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape, Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?

It was before him again in its completeness--the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.