As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

— Edith Wharton

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

— Edith Wharton

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.

— 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

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to

— Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

— Edith Wharton

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all this kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

— Edith Wharton

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart

— Edith Wharton

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

— Edith Wharton

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

— Edith Wharton