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Edith Wharton quotes

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“it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“Everything may be labelled—but everybody is not.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Ah, good conversation—there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“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.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“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.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“A woman's standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Women ought to be free—as free as we are” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“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...” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“After all, marriage is marriage, and money's money—both useful things in their way ...” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Edith Wharton, Vesalius in Zante
“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“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.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“He felt, no doubt, more sorry for her than her indignant relatives; but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, even if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“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.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“he wondered at what age 'nice' women began to speak for themselves.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“What others? I don't profess to be different from my kind. I'm consumed by the same wants and the same longings.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“They're all alike, you know: they hold their tongues for years, and you think you're safe, but when their opportunity comes they remember everything.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
“She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Related topics

life marriage love solitude emptiness living conversation truth woman loneliness women reality passion future light silence boredom vision America want

Related sources

The Age of Innocence (39)
House of Mirth (9)
Vesalius in Zante (1)