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

— Edith Wharton

I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.' It's their armor,' he thought, 'their defense against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

— Edith Wharton

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

— Edith Wharton

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

— Edith Wharton

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbors, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theater than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted by culture.

— Edith Wharton

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.

— Edith Wharton

I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

— Edith Wharton

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. Furthermore, I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

— Edith Wharton

In any perfect subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

— Edith Wharton

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendancy. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived.

— Edith Wharton