The Custom of the Country Quotes

“She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“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 impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"

Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need – as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“- he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“What do you call the weak point?" He paused. "The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in them.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“imagination WAS the eagle that devoured Prometheus!”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth—Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it “right off.” And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“Undine Spragg—how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid "bell-boy" had just brought in.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause,”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country