661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

We shall hurt others less. Isn’t it, after all, what you always wanted?

You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women – my best friends – well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long – people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.

She’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.

It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them.

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape,” Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, “on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?

Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.

It seems so to me,” said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.