661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

..., в чьей манере было изъясняться откровенно, когда не было причин, житейских или денежных, о чем то умалчивать. (О Сюзи Бранч)

...удивила его противоречивым сочетанием в ней современного чувства практической целесообразности и старомодного понятия честности... (Ник Лэнсинг - о Сюзи Бранч)

It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

If the collective life which results from our individual money-making is not richer, more interesting and more stimulating than that of countries where the individual effort is less intense, then it looks as if there were something wrong about our method.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.