Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune. — 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
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
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert. — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should… — Edith Wharton Copy Share Image
Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes. — 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
