Edith Wharton Quotes

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!!... What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, & eating bananas for breakfast.

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism!

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

We who knew him well know how great he would have been if he had never written a line.

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