“It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“...he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“She made no answer, and he went on: “What’s the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“To the French, [le plaisir] is a part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life. ” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability. — 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
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
Life is the only real counsellor;Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the… — 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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“... no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“...the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.” — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“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 Image
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend! — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 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… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
