Quotes By Author: Edith Wharton

“High PastureCome up–come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is not–but the flowOf vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,Poured from the far world’s flaming boundariesIn waxing tides of unimagined glow.And to that height illumined of the mindhe 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.”

“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”

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

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

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

“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, the very meaning of one’s soul.”