Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
World
Reality
Thought
Hieroglyphic
Done
Hieroglyphics
Real
Represented
Even
Arbitrary
Thing
Signs
Kind
Innocence
Never
Lived

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith Wharton
Image
In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Image
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
Edith Wharton
Image
Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
Edith Wharton
Image
Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.
Edith Wharton
Image
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
Image
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton
Image
It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
Image
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
Image
It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.
Edith Wharton
Image
Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
Edith Wharton
Image
What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
Edith Wharton
Image
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton