661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

It’s a hundred years since we’ve met – it may be another hundred before we meet again.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry – architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?

My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. “How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.” She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.

How beautiful it was – and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.

It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.