661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her.

The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had “placed” one by one in enviable niches of existence!

When a man says he doesn’t understand a woman it’s because he won’t take the trouble.

Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.

To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?

Once – twice – you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake – I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me – I understood. It was too late for happiness – but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on – don’t take it from me now!

I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: ‘Please give me Edith Wharton’s book’; and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read!

She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.