"Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 11 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications."
Read quote
3 likes
"Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me."
Read quote
3 likes
"Poetry and art are the breath of life to her."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch."
Read quote
3 likes
"I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids."
Read quote
3 likes
"How I hate everything!"
Read quote
3 likes
"I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth's millions."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer."
Read quote
3 likes
"He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise."
Read quote
3 likes
"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints."
Read quote
3 likes
"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"
Read quote
3 likes
"Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!"
Read quote
3 likes
"For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue."
Read quote
3 likes
"The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth."
Read quote
3 likes
"The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form."
Read quote
3 likes