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
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.
It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.
There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.
As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.