Edith Wharton Quotes

197 quotes in 2620 categories

• The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.
• Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That…
• We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
• How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and…
• There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
• It is the omnipresent rush of water which give the Este Gardens their peculiar character. From the Anio, drawn up the hillside at incalculable cost…
• It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
• It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you…
• As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
• Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
• The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
• Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.
• One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
• Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction,…
• I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and…
• Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art.…
• I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What…
• In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
• It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
• To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

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