Edith Wharton Quotes

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.(The Triumph Of The Night)

~ Edith Wharton

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.

~ Edith Wharton

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

~ Edith Wharton

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

~ Edith Wharton

Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.

~ Edith Wharton

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

~ Edith Wharton

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

~ Edith Wharton

Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

~ Edith Wharton

In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

~ Edith Wharton

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

~ Edith Wharton

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

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

~ Edith Wharton

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

~ Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

~ Edith Wharton

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

~ Edith Wharton