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

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

Edith Wharton

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

Edith Wharton

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

Edith Wharton

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Edith Wharton

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Edith Wharton

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

Edith Wharton

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

Edith Wharton

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

Edith Wharton

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

Edith Wharton

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

Edith Wharton

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Edith Wharton

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

Edith Wharton

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

Edith Wharton

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Edith Wharton

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

Edith Wharton

High Pasture Come up--come up: in the dim vale below The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow, Night is not, autumn is not--but the flow Of vast, ...

Edith Wharton

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

Edith Wharton

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

Edith Wharton

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of ren...

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