Edith Wharton quotes - page 4

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. (Edith Wharton)
It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. View quote
Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one. View quote
Edith Wharton
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences. View quote
Edith Wharton
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast. View quote
Edith Wharton
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board. View quote
Edith Wharton
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. View quote
Edith Wharton
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. View quote
Edith Wharton
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears. View quote
Edith Wharton
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? View quote
Edith Wharton
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. (Edith Wharton)
Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves? View quote
Edith Wharton
How I hate everything! View quote
Edith Wharton
Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. "Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary - she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. View quote
Edith Wharton
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty. View quote
Edith Wharton
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath. View quote
Edith Wharton
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free. View quote
Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime. View quote
Edith Wharton
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers. View quote
Edith Wharton
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background. View quote
Edith Wharton
...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins. (Edith Wharton)
Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress. View quote
Edith Wharton
... though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert. View quote
Edith Wharton
There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. View quote
Edith Wharton
I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome. View quote
Edith Wharton