Edith Wharton citáty

strana 3

„Kdybychom se přestali snažit být šťastní, mohli bychom se mít zatraceně dobře.“

„Jediným skutečným rádcem je život; moudrost nefiltrovaná osobní zkušeností se nestane součástí morální tkáně.“

“I can't love you unless I give you up.”

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

“It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”

“Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”

“You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.”

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…”

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

“The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it."

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe.”

“Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your
old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart”

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”

“Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.”

“It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”

“Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”

“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.”

“Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.”

“How I hate everything!”

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.”

“… It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

“What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”

“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.”

“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”

“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,
Old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”

“Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?”

“There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.”

“Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.”

“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.”

“In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.”