661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

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.

She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.

He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.

I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it’s because there’s nothing to worry them.

There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown.

He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.

What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader’s mind just as it left the writer’s – without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought – it has been read to no purpose.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth’s millions.