Edith Wharton

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."

Each time you happen to me all over again.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

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.

And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

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