"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
— Edith Wharton

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
— Edith Wharton

"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."
— Edith Wharton

"Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair."
— Edith Wharton

"My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet."
— Edith Wharton

"In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways."
— Edith Wharton

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding it's breath."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region."
— Edith Wharton

"In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything."
— 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."
— Edith Wharton

"Silence may be as variously shaded as speech."
— Edith Wharton

"'She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.'

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: 'She never asked me.'"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"Each time you happen to me all over again. "
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.'"
— Edith Wharton

"...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers..."
— Edith Wharton

"Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."
— Edith Wharton

"You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute."
— Edith Wharton

"What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."
— Edith Wharton

"His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. "
— Edith Wharton

"He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime."
— Edith Wharton

"She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask."
— Edith Wharton

"Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."
— Edith Wharton

"'Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
'Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.'"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, and interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul. "
— Edith Wharton

"The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories. "
— Edith Wharton

"To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom."
— Edith Wharton

"Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"...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

"He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"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 English-speaking audiences.
"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity...
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them."
— Edith Wharton

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

""As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitutde, but compassion holding its breath."

h/t to wordsmith.org"
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"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."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

""Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.""
— Edith Wharton

"The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but...each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things."
— Edith Wharton

"Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. "How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman." She leaned back in a luxury of discontent."
— Edith Wharton

"In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways."
— Edith Wharton