Quote

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

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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
Way
Rise
Dreaded
People
York
Bred
Disease
Decency
Except
Scandal
Gave
Placed
Scene
Scenes
Courage
Ill
Nothing
Considered

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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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.
Edith Wharton
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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?
Edith Wharton
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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Edith Wharton
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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
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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
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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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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
Edith Wharton
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
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She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
Edith Wharton
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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
Edith Wharton
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One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton