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6014018
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He reviewed his friends marriages - the supposedly happy ones - and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgement, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming wh..
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relationship-quotes
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Edith Wharton |
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dd00d20
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What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal."
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Edith Wharton |
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b6fdd95
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Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.
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Edith Wharton |
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aee2cc8
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What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?
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Edith Wharton |
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fbc5a56
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People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, ..
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Edith Wharton |
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b353d3c
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But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in it..
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Edith Wharton |
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6679aa7
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The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.
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Edith Wharton |
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b2ffacc
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You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all.
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Edith Wharton |
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2e7ad0d
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As she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her ..
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Edith Wharton |
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6cdc188
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Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.
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Edith Wharton |
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9f29f39
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he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.
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Edith Wharton |
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07e70ee
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Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing with their own households. Men and women equally, when they have the range of interests that real cultivation gives, need the stimulus of different points of view, the refreshment of new ideas as well as of new faces. The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and wo..
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intelligence
gender-roles
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Edith Wharton |
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df9b763
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Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers..
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aristocracy
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Edith Wharton |
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3c0b288
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Courage is about the most useful thing in an artist's outfit.
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Edith Wharton |
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abfff5d
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Mrs. Peyton made no answer. She knew how much hung on the possibility of his whining the competition which for weeks past had engrossed him.
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Edith Wharton |
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6f0f658
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I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit.
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love
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Edith Wharton |
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c109423
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Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
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Edith Wharton |
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bef21c9
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Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.
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Edith Wharton |
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e28ab5a
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It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.
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Edith Wharton |
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6d7f093
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Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.
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Edith Wharton |
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dc786e9
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The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.
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Edith Wharton |
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84d432f
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I can't bear to see myself in my own thoughts--I hate ugliness, you know
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Edith Wharton |
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2e50438
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What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?
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Edith Wharton |
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4e6c11e
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To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.
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Edith Wharton |
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afe9927
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She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.
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Edith Wharton |
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2af6e2e
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The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.
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male-privilege
sexual-harassmen
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Edith Wharton |
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34bfce8
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Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.
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Edith Wharton |
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f816ad4
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She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.
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female-objectification
objectification
male-gaze
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Edith Wharton |
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5a28873
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One of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it." "You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense; but your lungs are thinking about the air, if you are not. And so it is with your rich people--they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while..
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poverty
it-s-expensive-to-be-poor
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Edith Wharton |
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820e778
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If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.
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politics-of-fashion
women-s-fashion
objectification
male-gaze
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Edith Wharton |
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e03dcf9
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If the collective life which results from our individual money-making is not richer, more interesting and more stimulating than that of countries where the individual effort is less intense, then it looks as if there were something wrong about our method.
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money-making
society
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Edith Wharton |
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7e8b54d
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Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.
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education
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Edith Wharton |
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b90a111
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The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths.
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Edith Wharton |
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7ddbb53
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The tragedy of the woman's death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the disaster of his bright irreclaimableness.
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Edith Wharton |
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cdea913
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His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly centralized polity.
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Edith Wharton |
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65e4562
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Cuando estamos separados y deseo verte, cada pensamiento se consume en una gran llama... entonces llegad, y eres tanto mas de lo que recordaba, y lo que quiero de ti tanto mas que una hora o dos de vez en cuando, con desiertos de sedienta espera en los intervalos, que soy perfectamente capaz de quedarme quieto a tu lado, como ahora, simplemente confiando con tranquilidad en que todo llegara a ser real.
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Edith Wharton |
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6837b46
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he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscio..
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Edith Wharton |
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918722d
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What do you call the weak point?" He paused. "The fact that the average American looks down on his wife."
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marriage
relationships
humor
undine-spragg
weak-point
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Edith Wharton |
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a548411
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That Greiner house, now--a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he'll get out of that phase, and want something that the cr..
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distinction
keeping-up-with-the-joneses
taste
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Edith Wharton |
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5bc45e7
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even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion.
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Edith Wharton |
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a9f80f3
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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Edith Wharton |
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35e433f
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
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Edith Wharton |
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711b333
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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Edith Wharton |
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8d4bf62
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Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
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Edith Wharton |