Edith Wharton > Quotes

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet”
― Edith Wharton

“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
― Edith Wharton

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”
― Edith Wharton

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
― Edith Wharton

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”
― Edith Wharton

“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”
― Edith Wharton

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”
― Edith Wharton

“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“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, The Age of Innocence

“She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
― Edith Wharton

“I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”
― Edith Wharton

“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.”
― Edith Wharton

“Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.”
― Edith Wharton

“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”
― Edith Wharton

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”
― Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance