Quotes by Edith Wharton

“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

“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.”

“The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.”

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but theres only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy theres no reason...”

“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment and it helped me. It has always helped me. ”

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

“Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that...”

“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one s...”

“..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.”

“Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appeti...”

“As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that ...”

“If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.”

“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

“He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she wa...”

“A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignoranc...”

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of En...”

“...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over?...”

“To know when to be generous and when firmthat is wisdom.”

“You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that w...”