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Edith Wharton Inspirational Quotes (144)

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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.
Edith Wharton
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They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
Edith Wharton
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there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
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... 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.
Edith Wharton
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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
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Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
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They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Edith Wharton
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We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
Edith Wharton
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What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
Edith Wharton
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
Edith Wharton
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Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
Edith Wharton
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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Edith Wharton
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton
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Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
Edith Wharton
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The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
Edith Wharton
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I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.
Edith Wharton
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Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
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Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
Edith Wharton
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
Edith Wharton
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
Edith Wharton
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
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He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
Edith Wharton
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