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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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
Without
Breakfast
Developing
Shame
Eating
Nation
Beauty
Nations
Sense
Bananas

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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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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
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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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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
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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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We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
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He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
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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.
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What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
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Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
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If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
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The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
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there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
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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.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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