Quotes by Edith Wharton

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

“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

“There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be el...”

“The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches”

“It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which ne...”

“True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.”

“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

“Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”

“Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.”

“I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly ...”

“The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story...”

“High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Nig...”

“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic”

“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.”

“Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.”

“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eterna...”

“As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated...”

“The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into...”

“What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.”

“If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the...”