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Edith Wharton QUOTES

Edith Wharton QUOTES

1 " Each time you happen to me all over again. "

― Edith Wharton , The Age of Innocence

2 " 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

3 " Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. "

― Edith Wharton

4 " To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom. "

― Edith Wharton

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

― Edith Wharton

6 " There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time. "

― Edith Wharton , Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

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

― Edith Wharton , Ethan Frome

8 " True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision. "

― Edith Wharton , The Writing of Fiction

9 " Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. "

― Edith Wharton , The Writing of Fiction

10 " 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

11 " 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, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.

And to that height illumined of the mind
he calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay--
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day. "

― Edith Wharton

12 " Her failure was a useful preliminary to success. "

― Edith Wharton , The Custom of the Country

13 " One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop. "

― Edith Wharton , The House of Mirth

14 " 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 could be bored by such dreams as hers! "

― Edith Wharton , The Buccaneers

15 " I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.

'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe. "

― Edith Wharton

16 " The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading. "

― Edith Wharton

17 " What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that. "

― Edith Wharton , The Quicksand

18 " If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture. "

― Edith Wharton , French Ways and Their Meaning

19 " The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears. "

― Edith Wharton

20 " With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. "

― Edith Wharton , The Age of Innocence