Quotes from Edith Wharton

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape, Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.

And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.

Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom.

She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.

his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.