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
...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
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.
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
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.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.