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“We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“How beautiful it was---and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“You asked me just now for the truth---well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing . . .”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“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 ascendency. 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, The House of Mirth

“Ah, he would take her beyond---beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.”
― Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers

“There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.”
― Edith Wharton

“I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.

("Wants")”
― Grace Paley, Short Shorts

“Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir

“When she said to him once "It looks as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“Cât de mult se vor putea cunoaÈ™te unul pe altul, când datoria lui de om "cumsecade" era să nu-i destăinuie trecutul, iar a ei, ca fată de măritat, să nu aibă nici un fel de trecut de ascuns?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“- ... e o fată delicioasă: n-am mai văzut o a doua ființă atât de deÈ™teaptă È™i de draguță. EÈ™ti tare îndrăgostit de ea?
Newland Archer râse roșind:
- Cât poate fi un bărbat.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“- E ora mea favorită... nu e È™i a dumitale?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“...fusese totdeauna dispus să creadă că hazardul È™i împrejurările jucau un rol minor în soarta oamenilor, în comparaÈ›ie cu înclinaÈ›ia lor înnăscută de a-È™i făuri singuri soarta.”
― Edith Wharton

“Să emigreze! Parcă un gentleman ar putea să-È™i părăsească patria!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Prin liniÈ™tea ei, din care lipsea orice nuanță de surpriză, prin simplitatea ei, izbutea să înlăture orice convenÈ›ie, făcându-l să înÈ›eleagă cât de firesc era, pentru doi vechi prieteni care aveau să-È™i spună atâtea, să caute să fie singuri.”
― Edith Wharton

“Edith learned long ago that men are drawn to women who are either undeniably beautiful or alluringly vulnerable. She’s never been either.”
― Jennie Fields, The Age of Desire

“But Wharton hadn’t published any of her books while she lived in this
house. At Land’s End, she had been unknown, an unhappy married woman.
She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a
novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how
terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big
lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She
wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“He experiences everything with a childlike pleasure that she deems the essential element of a good traveler.”
― Jennie Fields, The Age of Desire