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
Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.
I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.
Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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.
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other ...
Everybody who does anything at all does too much.