Edith Wharton

“The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.”

“...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?”

“True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.”

“Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her.”

“Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it”

“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")”

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”

“Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. "How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman." She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.”

“Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.”

“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.”

“He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.”

“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

“The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but...each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.”

“he plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate”

“...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.”

“To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.”

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”

“Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.”

“She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.”

“There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.”

“Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?”

“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”

“Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.”

“The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.”

“The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it."You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe.”

“And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

“But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power." (Newland Archer of Countess Olenska)”

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

“Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. ”

“We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.”

“It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels.”

“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.”

“In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.”

“The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had "placed" one by one in enviable niches of existence!”

“When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness - as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.”

“Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.”

“But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”

“I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.”

“Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.”

“It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.”

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”

“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.”

“Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.”

“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

“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.”

“The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories. ”

“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.”

“I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: 'Please give me Edith Wharton's book'; and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read!”