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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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
Anything
Apparently
Duty
Worst
Else
More quotes by Edith Wharton
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
Edith Wharton
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton
Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
Edith Wharton
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
Edith Wharton
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Edith Wharton
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
Edith Wharton
And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
Edith Wharton
Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
Edith Wharton
[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
Edith Wharton
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
Edith Wharton
Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
Edith Wharton
It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
