Quotes from Edith Wharton
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
- Edith Wharton
Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.
- Edith Wharton
Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
- Edith Wharton
She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.
- Edith Wharton
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
- Edith Wharton
Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.
- Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime.
- Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
- Edith Wharton
She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.
- Edith Wharton
Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down.
- Edith Wharton
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
- Edith Wharton
But it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
- Edith Wharton