"The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background."
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 7 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every house is a mad-house at some time or another."
Read quote
6 likes
"I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true."
Read quote
6 likes
"whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself."
Read quote
6 likes
"Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them."
Read quote
6 likes
"I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings."
Read quote
6 likes
"It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes."
Read quote
6 likes
"I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."
Read quote
6 likes
"I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes."
Read quote
6 likes
"He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty."
Read quote
6 likes
"She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life."
Read quote
6 likes
"“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”"
Read quote
6 likes
"My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!"
Read quote
6 likes
"He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied."
Read quote
6 likes
"there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine."
Read quote
6 likes
"He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters."
Read quote
6 likes
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
Read quote
6 likes
"Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not."
Read quote
6 likes
"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."
Read quote
6 likes
"In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."
Read quote
6 likes