24 Quotes by Edith Wharton
- What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
- The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
- The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
- The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
- The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
- There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
- There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
- 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.
- Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
- If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
- Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
- A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
- After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
- Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
- Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
- 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.
- He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
- I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
- 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.
- In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
- Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
- My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.
- There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it
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