Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for? It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We’ve been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.

— 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

Each time you happen to me all over again.

— Edith Wharton

Fedora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

— Edith Wharton

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

— Edith Wharton

He could not imagine being bored by Busy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was someone with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.

— Edith Wharton

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

— Edith Wharton

Her mind was a hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

— Edith Wharton

High Pasture Come up--come up: in the dim vale below The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow, Night is not, autumn is not--but the flow Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas, Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries In waxing tides of unimagined glow. And to that height illumined of the mind he calls us still by the familiar way, Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind, Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay--Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind, How on the heights is day and still more day.

— Edith Wharton

His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.

— Edith Wharton