Quotes from Ethan Frome

“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

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

“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal's suffering was intolerable to him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie's hair and that his hand was on her face.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“...And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“...how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs Hale had said ‘You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,’ and he felt less alone with his misery.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

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