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
My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!
In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.
I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.
Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words ...
When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.
Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other ...
Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.
Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.