Quotes from Edith Wharton

Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we're supposing about under any obligation to the other party - the one he was trying to buy the property from?' Ralph hesitated. 'Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.' Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest question.

Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;

And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave—a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

He had no desire to marry at all—that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now—

The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths.

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.

The tragedy of the woman's death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the disaster of his bright irreclaimableness.

As long ago as Pythagoras, man was taught that all things were in a state of flux, without end as without beginning, and must we still, after more than two thousand years, pretend to regard the universe as some gigantic toy manufactured in six days by a Superhuman Artisan, who is presently to destroy it at his pleasure?

In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the door-bell of the flat.

To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer.