Quotes from Edith Wharton

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.