Quotes from Edith Wharton
For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.
- Edith Wharton
No treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.
- Edith Wharton
A frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.
- Edith Wharton
Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.
- Edith Wharton
He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...
- Edith Wharton
She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.
- Edith Wharton
Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been plain people and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it.
- Edith Wharton
IT rose for them—their honey-moon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own.
- Edith Wharton
He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante—so he had seen her from the first.
- Edith Wharton
His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly centralized polity.
- Edith Wharton
I am horribly poor—and very expensive.
- Edith Wharton
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.
- Edith Wharton