Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed…

“Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver.”

— Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in…

— Edith Wharton

“But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it…

— Edith Wharton

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

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

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

— Edith Wharton

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

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

— Edith Wharton

“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

“...the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.”

— Edith Wharton

“... no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.”

— Edith Wharton

“Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it”

— Edith Wharton

“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

“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

“These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.”

— Edith Wharton