Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

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

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.

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.

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

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

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

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

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.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

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.

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?