Quotes about Change
If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you? Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.
— Edith Wharton
What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?
— Edith Wharton
Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.
— Edith Wharton
And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.
— Edith Wharton
A frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.
— Edith Wharton
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He
— Edith Wharton
It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.
— Edith Wharton
Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.
— Edith Wharton
But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.
— Edith Wharton
He had no desire to marry at all—that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now—
— Edith Wharton
Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up.
— Edith Wharton
As long ago as Pythagoras, man was taught that all things were in a state of flux, without end as without beginning, and must we still, after more than two thousand years, pretend to regard the universe as some gigantic toy manufactured in six days by a Superhuman Artisan, who is presently to destroy it at his pleasure?
— Edith Wharton