Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edith Wharton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1862
Born: January 24
Died: 1937
Died: August 11
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Edith Newbold Jones
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Face
Sunrise
Faces
Wet
Like
Ghost
Vain
Terror
Lips
Flower
Terrors
Arms
Ghosts

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
Edith Wharton
Image
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Edith Wharton
Image
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
Image
[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
Edith Wharton
Image
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton
Image
I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
Edith Wharton
Image
She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
Image
There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
Edith Wharton
Image
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
Image
Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
Edith Wharton
Image
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
Edith Wharton
Image
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
Edith Wharton