661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt.

Don’t let us be like all the others! she protested.

After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.

She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.

At least,” she continued, “it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don’t know how to explain myself” – she drew together her troubled brows – “but it seems as if I’d never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.

It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.