661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. "The House of Mirth

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.

That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

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

True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.