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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1862
Born: January 24
Died: 1937
Died: August 11
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Edith Newbold Jones
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Life
Rope
Tight
Bed
Either
Literature
Give
Tightrope
Giving
Feather
Always
Feathers

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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
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Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
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The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
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It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
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One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
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To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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