661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no parting.

По правде сказать, в её жизни с Фалмерами не было ни минуты покоя, но вся эта суматоха казалась Сюзи менее бессмысленной и потому менее утомительной, чем суета, которой сопровождалось существование людей вроде Олтрингема, Урсулы Джиллоу, Элли Вандерлин и их свиты... (О Сюзи Бранч)

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple.

Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.