Edith Wharton Quotes

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

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

… caprice is as ruinous as routine.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self?

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 eternal and irrepressible freshness.

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

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.

In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.