Edith Wharton Quotes

• Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Life

• If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ourselves, Happy

• Stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so much more to talk about.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Mrs Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Paying for what she doesn’t get rankles so dreadfully with Louisa; I can’t make her see that it’s one of the preliminary steps to getting what you haven’t paid for.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• She keeps on being Queenly in her own room, with the door shut.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness, to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people’s lives.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Of course, being fatally poor and dingy, it was wise of Gerty to have taken up philanthropy and symphony concerts.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• She was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I despair of the Republic!… What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

• There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope

• Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Success

• My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Dog, Animal

• They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Themselves, Surprised, Romance, Happiness

• Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Dialogue

• Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

  Edith Wharton

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Symptom, Immaturity, Writing

Edith Wharton (46)

Birth:	24th January, 1862
Death:	11th August, 1937
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist

About

Edith Wharton was 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.

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