Edith Wharton

“If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.”

“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.”

“She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty, towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty, who could only falter out: "Lily, Lily-- how can you laugh about such things?""So as not to weep, perhaps. But no-- I'm not of the tearful order. I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.”

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”

“He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.”

“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”

“The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.”

“I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.”

“Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

“A smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.”

“She was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.”

“I can't love you unless I give you up.”

“It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”

“And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!”

“She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.”

“The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt.”

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

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

“He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.”

“He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.”

“The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.”

“Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.”

“Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?”

“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”

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

“She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. 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.”

“Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom.”

“Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.”

“Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to”

“She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.”

“For she was really too lovely--too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished--and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow's-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and chatted? but then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments...”

“She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.”

“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be”

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

“But we're so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.”

“One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.”

“Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?”

“Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.”

“Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone”

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”

“She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring-that's all.”

“We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?”

“To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.”

“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.”

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.”

“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”

“She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.”

“- he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!”