Edith Wharton Quotes

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

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, and t...

Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and inimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room to spare on those waters for...

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have...

Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations?

The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had n...

It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was so...

And once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before—I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end. Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his...

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his si...

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between th...

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology?

He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.

The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had l...

Увы, только замужеством по меркам этого мира она могла добиться независимости от него же. (О Сюзи Бранч)

Seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He

Is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama, all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and actions.

Running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence...

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

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and ada...