Quotes from Edith Wharton

Undine Spragg—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in.

You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented? No woman ever knows she's discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I've seen smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership.

he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.

He pulled the sash down and turned back. Catch my death! he echoed; and he felt like adding: But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months.

Not for the world would he have made a significant to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

Perhaps, if I hadn't been, once before—I mean, if I'd always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end." Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. "I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

It was the old New York way, of taking life 'without effusion of blood''; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of limes.