A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
- Edith Wharton Quote

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

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
- Edith Wharton Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
- Edith Wharton Quote

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
- Edith Wharton Quote

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
- Edith Wharton Quote

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

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

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
- Edith Wharton Quote

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

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
- Edith Wharton Quote