661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

He did not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone.

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you’re safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.

From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

You asked me just now for the truth – well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self?

I was never allowed to read the popular American children’s books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author’s knowing it.

There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.

When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.

The idea that reading is a moral quality has unhappily led many conscientious persons to renounce their innocuous dalliance with light literature for more strenuous intercourse. These are the persons who “make it a rule to read.