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 other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.