Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death. — Edith Wharton

Life is made up of compromises. — Edith Wharton

I don’t know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting. — Edith Wharton

I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life–lover, life–wonderer, and adventurer. — Edith Wharton

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity. — Edith Wharton

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her. — Edith Wharton

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins. — Edith Wharton

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well–ordered life: amusement and respectability. — Edith Wharton

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets. — Edith Wharton

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. — Edith Wharton

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any. — Edith Wharton

To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it? — Edith Wharton

I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end. — Edith Wharton

Life is either always a tight–rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight–rope. — Edith Wharton

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

Damn words; they’re just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing–brushes. I wish I didn’t have to think in words. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

He arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life — Edith Wharton

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins. — Edith Wharton

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. — Edith Wharton

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul. — Edith Wharton

The turnings of life seldon show a sign–post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway–crossing. — Edith Wharton

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all. — Edith Wharton

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well–you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. — Edith Wharton

I can’t love you unless I give you up. — Edith Wharton

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all! — Edith Wharton

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. — Edith Wharton

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes. — Edith Wharton

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content. — Edith Wharton

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes. — Edith Wharton

It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them. — Edith Wharton

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings. — Edith Wharton

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order. — Edith Wharton

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert. — Edith Wharton

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears. — Edith Wharton

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. — Edith Wharton

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante. — Edith Wharton

B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. — Edith Wharton

Whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself. — Edith Wharton

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart. — Edith Wharton

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories. — Edith Wharton

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty. — Edith Wharton

And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities. — Edith Wharton

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute. — Edith Wharton

I was a failure in Boston…because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable. — Edith Wharton

And all the while, I suppose,’ he thought, ‘real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them … — Edith Wharton

It was too late for happiness–but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on–don’t take it from me now — Edith Wharton

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. — Edith Wharton

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity––their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought. — Edith Wharton

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening. — Edith Wharton

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. — Edith Wharton

But marriage is one long sacrifice…. Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer — Edith Wharton

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. — Edith Wharton

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights. — Edith Wharton

I wonder, among all the tangles of thIs mortal coIl, whIch one contaIns tIghter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tuggIng, and paIn, and dIversIfIed elements of mIsery, than the marrIage tIe. — Edith Wharton

She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies. — Edith Wharton

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. — Edith Wharton

But it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune. — Edith Wharton

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate. — Edith Wharton

I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and––unnecessary. — Edith Wharton

Though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert. — Edith Wharton

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. — Edith Wharton