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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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The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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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.
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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
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I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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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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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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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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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.
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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