Amy > Amy 's Quotes

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”
― Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty

“If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.”
― Taylor Swift

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

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

“...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

“To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.”
― Edith Wharton

“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.”
― 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

“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

“...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...”
― Edith Wharton

“Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“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 side and hypocrisy on the other.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them. ”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it."

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton

“He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.”
― Edith Wharton

“Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Words are the dress of thoughts; which should no more be presented in rags, tatters, and dirt than your person should.”
― Lord Chesterfield