Old New York Quotes

“Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“For she was really too lovely--too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished--and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow's-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and chatted? but then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments...”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Remember, the people you meet here now come out of kindness. I’m an old woman, and I consider nothing else.” That was all.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“The self-sufficing little society of that vanished New York attached no great importance to wealth, but regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no account of it.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“She had done one great—or abominable—thing; rank it as you please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to keep her at that height.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“If she could not read books she could read hearts; and she bent a playful yet compassionate gaze on mine while it still floundered in unawareness.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not the oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed declassee, but the air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied of society and closed her doors to all save her intimates.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs. Wessons? If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day...no woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m ready.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for a moment...” She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that privilege,” she interrupted.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put up with— a girl alone in the world—who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman!”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this was the danger besetting men who had a “way with women”— the day came when they might follow it too blindly.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately “cut”; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Well, my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore low-necked dresses all day long and all the year round.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“(It was typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.)”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Almost any man can take a stand on a principle his fellow-citizens are already occupying; but Hayley Delane held out for things his friends could not comprehend, and did it for reasons he could not explain”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins. In less time than seemed possible in so slow-moving a society, the Delane’s family crisis had been smothered and forgotten.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“And they breathed a joint sigh over the vanished “Old New York” of their youth, the exclusive and impenetrable New York to which Rubini and Jenny Lind had sung and Mr. Thackeray lectured, the New York which had declined to receive Charles Dickens, and which, out of revenge, he had so scandalously ridiculed.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“He and Major Detrancy had one trait in common—the extreme caution of the old New Yorker.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive; and I suspected that Delane had stopped at about nineteen.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“That was the dark time of our national indifference, before the country’s awakening; no doubt the war seemed much farther from us, much less a part of us, than it does to the young men of today.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“She saw that it was a terrible, a sacrilegious thing to interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest touch upon any human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion. Delia had twice intervened in Charlotte Lovell’s life:”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Ah, but you have—you have! You’ve always thought of him in thinking of Tina—of him and nobody else! A woman never stops thinking of the man she loves. She thinks of him years afterward, in all sorts of unconscious ways, in thinking of all sorts of things—books, pictures, sunsets, a flower or a ribbon—or a clock on the mantelpiece,”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Since the day when you discovered that Clement Spender hadn’t quite broken his heart because he wasn’t good enough for you; since you found your revenge and your triumph in keeping me at your mercy, and in taking his child from me!” Charlotte’s words flamed up as if from the depth of the infernal fires; then the blaze dropped, her head sank forward, and she stood before Delia dumb and stricken.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Yes; I feel that.” Charlotte Lovell took a hurried breath. “But the question is: WHICH OF US IS HER MOTHER?”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“Old New York always thought away whatever interfered with the perfect propriety of its arrangements.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“But she had once learned that one can do almost anything (perhaps even murder) if one does not attempt to explain it; and the lesson had never been forgotten.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York

“people realize in heaven that it’s a devilish sight harder, on earth, to do a brave thing at forty-five than at twenty-five.”
― Edith Wharton, Old New York