661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words ...

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.