661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

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

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.