Edith Wharton Quotes
-
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
-
Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
-
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
-
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
-
It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
-
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
-
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
-
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
-
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
-
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
-
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-
What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
-
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain - No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth's millions.
-
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
-
I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
-
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
-
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
-
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
-
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
-
To James's intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.
-
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
-
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
-
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
-
Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.