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
...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers... — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then,… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
“Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who… — 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
