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And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening 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
Real
Things
People
Suppose
Happenings
Happening
Somewhere
Living
Thought

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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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.
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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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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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What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
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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.
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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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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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.
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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
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Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
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One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
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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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... 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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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.
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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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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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