Edith Wharton

“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

“In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived.”

“...the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?”

“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”

“She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.”

“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.”

“What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.”

“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic”

“When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches”

“Medora 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.”

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

“...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.”

“It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.”

“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”

“The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.”

“למרות החולי והצער, שהוא אויבנו הגדול, אנו יכולים לשרוד... אם אין אנו מפחדים משינויים, אם אנו סקרנים, מתעניינים בדברים גדולים ומאושרים בדברים הקטנים שבחיים.”

“הרגל הוא מן ההכרח, אך אם ברצוננו להישאר בחיים אנו חייבים להיאבק בהרגל ההופך שביל לשִגרה.”