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
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.
She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.