Quotes from Edith Wharton

I can give you a cup of tea in no time-and you won't meet any bores.

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you? Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.

Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.

It's rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people—the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.

Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing.

Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents and her half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield.

Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.

From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

How beautiful it was---and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.

But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.

You asked me just now for the truth---well, the truth about any girl is that once she's talk about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.

All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the new people whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to

She was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.

Some men, Flamel irresistibly added, think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.

Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.

Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her....

She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.