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
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.
Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...
Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.