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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
First
Lottery
Thing
Missed
Something
Drawn
Would
Prize
Life
Flower
Like
Knew
Despairing
Thought
Unattainable
Firsts
Improbable
More quotes by Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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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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Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
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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.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
Edith Wharton
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
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She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
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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.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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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.
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I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
Edith Wharton
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
