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One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.

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
Ways
Alive
Disintegration
Small
Unafraid
Happy
Insatiable
Bigs
Curiosity
Change
Remain
Way
Intellectual
Things
Interested

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He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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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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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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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
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They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
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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.
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Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
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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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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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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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[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
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