Quotes About Edith Wharton

The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.

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

his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

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.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.

he wonders whether young women raised under such restrictive conditions can ever overcome the disadvantage of deliberately engineered lacunae in their mental, moral, and emotional development. The

And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.

I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence?

He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...

put into words by this selfish, well-fed, and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.

It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.

Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck.

But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop

I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?

Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.

What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?

The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed

S? emigreze! Parc? un gentleman ar putea s?-?i p?r?seasc? patria!

is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama, all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and actions.

He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.