Quotes from Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
- Edith Wharton
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
- Edith Wharton
The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.
- Edith Wharton
I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.
- Edith Wharton
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
- Edith Wharton
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
- Edith Wharton
That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods…
- Edith Wharton
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
- Edith Wharton
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
- Edith Wharton
I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.
- Edith Wharton
The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
- Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- Edith Wharton