Edith Wharton

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

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

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

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

I suppose 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.

Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

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

Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

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

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.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.("The Triumph Of The Night")