661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?

To know when to be generous and when firm – that is wisdom.

She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.

I am horribly poor – and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.

Meanwhile everything matters – that concerns you.

When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness – as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness – too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely.

I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction.