661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own.

There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.

Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.

What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ’em out.

All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.

After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,” he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t.

There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.

Nothing about his betrothed please him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they had both been brought up.