"What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."
Read quote
12 likes
Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 4 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom."
Read quote
12 likes
"We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours."
Read quote
11 likes
"After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others."
Read quote
11 likes
"To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers."
Read quote
11 likes
"... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump."
Read quote
11 likes
"My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet."
Read quote
11 likes
"Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death."
Read quote
11 likes
"Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits."
Read quote
11 likes
"Life is made up of compromises."
Read quote
10 likes
"Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one."
Read quote
10 likes
"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."
Read quote
10 likes
"Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
Read quote
10 likes
"What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence."
Read quote
10 likes
"I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear."
Read quote
10 likes
"And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie."
Read quote
10 likes
"Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them."
Read quote
9 likes
"... caprice is as ruinous as routine."
Read quote
9 likes