Quotes by Edith Wharton

About Edith Wharton:

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

Edith Wharton

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

She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.

Edith Wharton

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

Edith Wharton

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

Edith Wharton

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches

Edith Wharton

The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

Edith Wharton

...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

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 par...

Edith Wharton

Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!

Edith Wharton

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...

Edith Wharton

You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone c...

Edith Wharton

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....

Edith Wharton

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome...

Edith Wharton

...they who exchange their independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is not gold that glitters... ...Eş gibi tatlı bir kelime karşılığında özgürlüklerinden vazgeçenler, parlayan her şeyin altın olmadığını g...

Edith Wharton

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Edith Wharton

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Edith Wharton

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.

Edith Wharton

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.

Edith Wharton

I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary.

Edith Wharton

Author Bio

  • NameEdith Wharton
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, short story writer, designer
  • BornJanuary 24, 1862
  • DiedAugust 11, 1937
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsKnight Of The Legion Of Honour; National Women's Hall Of Fame