Quote

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

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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
Firsts
Improbable
First
Lottery
Thing
Missed
Something
Drawn
Would
Prize
Life
Flower
Like
Knew
Despairing
Thought
Unattainable

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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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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.
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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.
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
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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.
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But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.
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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.
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He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
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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.
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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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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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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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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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.
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
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