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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

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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.
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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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Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
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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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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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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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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
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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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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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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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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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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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In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
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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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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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