Quotes from Edith Wharton

I can give you a cup of tea in no time-and you won't meet any bores.

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you? Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.

Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.

It's rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people—the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but...each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.

Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her.

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....