661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

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

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart