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 feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.
An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.
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!
I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them ...
whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.