Quote

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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
Preliminary
Useful
Failure
Success

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
Edith Wharton
Image
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Edith Wharton
Image
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
Image
I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
Edith Wharton
Image
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
Edith Wharton
Image
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.
Edith Wharton
Image
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Edith Wharton
Image
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
Edith Wharton
Image
The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
Edith Wharton
Image
Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
Edith Wharton
Image
There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Edith Wharton
Image
It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
Image
One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
Edith Wharton
Image
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
Edith Wharton