Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 7

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

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.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

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.

..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

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

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.