What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?" Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.” — 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
