A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. The Descent of Man, ch. 1 (1904).)

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always succumbed to "complications."

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Ethan Frome, ch. 7 (1911).)

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 (1862-1937), U.S. author. Judith, in The Children, ch. 25 (1928).)

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. letter, Feb. 12, 1909. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!!... What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, & eating bananas for breakfast.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. letter, Aug. 19, 1904, to Sara Norton, daughter of distinguished scholar Charles Eliot Norton. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, & I am not enough in sympathy with our "gros public" to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most d?plac? & useless class on earth!

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Letter, June 5, 1903, to Sara Norton, daughter of distinguished scholar Charles Eliot Norton. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988). Wharton spent most of her adult life in Europe.)

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Letter, August 19, 1927, to novelist and socialist Upton Sinclair. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)

We who knew him well know how great he would have been if he had never written a line.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Letter of condolence, March 1, 1916, written the day after James's death. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. letter, Nov. 19, 1907, following the publication of The Fruit of the Tree. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism!

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Letter, July 19, 1919. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)