Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings. — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast. — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners,… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“For she was really too lovely--too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“High Pasture Come up--come up: in the dim vale below The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it” — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“... no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“...the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend! — Edith Wharton Copy Share
With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in… — Edith Wharton Copy Share
“These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share
