661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on the seas.

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.