Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 9

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

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.

...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

I can't love you unless I give you up.

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.

To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

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.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

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 soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.