Edith Wharton

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
-Edith Wharton

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
-Edith Wharton

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
-Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
-Edith Wharton

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

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
-Edith Wharton

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
-Edith Wharton

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
-Edith Wharton

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.
-Edith Wharton

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
-Edith Wharton

I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.
-Edith Wharton

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
-Edith Wharton