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“Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“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

“I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.”
― Edith Wharton

“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

“Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
"The House of Mirth”
― Edith Wharton

“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

“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

“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.”
― Edith Wharton