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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.

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
Emancipate
Notion
Wife
Free
Use
Trying

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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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.
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Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
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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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She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
Edith Wharton