661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.