Life Quotes by Edith Wharton

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

— Edith Wharton

Life is made up of compromises.

— Edith Wharton

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

— Edith Wharton

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

— Edith Wharton

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

— Edith Wharton

“She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.”

— Edith Wharton

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

— Edith Wharton

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

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

— Edith Wharton

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

— Edith Wharton

“To the French, [le plaisir] is a part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life. ”

— 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

“I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.”

— Edith Wharton

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth…

— Edith Wharton

“The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had "placed" one by…

— Edith Wharton

“The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen…

— Edith Wharton

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark…

— Edith Wharton

The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance…

— Edith Wharton

“His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew…

— Edith Wharton

... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it…

— Edith Wharton

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living…

— Edith Wharton

“I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul…

— Edith Wharton

“There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as…

— Edith Wharton

“She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She…

— Edith Wharton

“Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read…

— Edith Wharton

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of…

— Edith Wharton

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life…

— Edith Wharton

“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't…

— Edith Wharton

“I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to…

— Edith Wharton

“He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by…

— Edith Wharton

“As soon as he heard of the Sillerton’s party he had said to himself that the Marchioness Manson would certainly come to…

— Edith Wharton

“Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he…

— Edith Wharton

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city…

— Edith Wharton

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

— Edith Wharton

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

— Edith Wharton

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.

— Edith Wharton

Life is the only real counsellor;Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue

— Edith Wharton

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

— Edith Wharton