Quotes from Edith Wharton

Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Juila was wounded in every fiber of her spirit.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

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.

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.

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.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony, and order.

I often wonder whether a frumpy old woman can ever be quite fair in her estimate of a young and lovely one.