661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...

In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.

Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.