661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled.

... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

If we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities... I mean, each woman's right to her liberty.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.