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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
Living
Thought
Real
Things
People
Suppose
Happenings
Happening
Somewhere

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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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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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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
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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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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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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.
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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
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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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What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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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.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
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Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
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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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