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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.

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
Think
Tongue
Thinking
Safe
Hold
Opportunity
Comes
Remember
Everything
Tongues
Years
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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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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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.
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Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.
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And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
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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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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
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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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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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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.
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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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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
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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 towards the watcher on the shore.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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