Edith Wharton Quotes

As she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surpris...

As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her s...

As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned. Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the...

But I am born happy every morning,

But I’ve caught it already. I am dead — I’ve been dead for months and months.

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 gust...

But hismarital education had since made strides, and he now knew that adisregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on withoutit but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provi...

But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wirele...

But in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood for the venture on...

But is it necessary, he urged, to confound Christ with His ministers, the law with its exponents? May not men preserve their hope of heaven and yet lead more endurable lives on earth? Ah, my child, be...

But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation...

But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.

But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty...

But, my dear, it's just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It's because we know we can't hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...

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.

Chi ama le idee non è destinato a morire di fame.

Courage is about the most useful thing in an artist's outfit.

Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.

Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of smart business methods, and whose new brick store testified...