To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

— Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

— Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.

— Edith Wharton

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.

— Edith Wharton

What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.

— Edith Wharton

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

— Edith Wharton

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

— Edith Wharton

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 mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Test valley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!

— Edith Wharton

You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one'powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a SOI. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions, but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Vote-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private' anything--is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge:an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in New York?

— Edith Wharton