Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Edith Whartonwas a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 January 1862
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.
Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.
The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.
One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.
Life is made up of compromises.
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.
in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time ...
In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.