Prin liniștea ei, din care lipsea orice nuanță de surpriză, prin simplitatea ei, izbutea să înlăture orice convenție, făcându-l să înțeleagă cât de firesc era, pentru doi vechi prieteni care aveau să-și spună atâtea, să caute să fie singuri. - Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time. - Edith Wharton
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
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? - Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it. - Edith Wharton
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. - 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
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time. - Edith Wharton
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie. - Edith Wharton
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. - Edith Wharton
My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet. - Edith Wharton
Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope. - Edith Wharton
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. - Edith Wharton
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. - Edith Wharton
The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears. - Edith Wharton
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. - Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time. - 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
It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other. - Edith Wharton
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
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? - Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. - Edith Wharton
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are. - 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
A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. - 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 renunciation. "The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. - Edith Wharton
Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there. - Edith Wharton
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. - Edith Wharton
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death. - Edith Wharton
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. - 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
It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made. - Edith Wharton
To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom. - Edith Wharton
Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up. - Edith Wharton
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. - 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
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views. - Edith Wharton
The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done. - Edith Wharton