Quote

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.

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
Lovers
Deliberate
Pages
Deliver
Books
Wit
Meanly
Call
Lover
Abject
Reading
Turning
Wits
True
Surrender
Luxurious
Book
Page
Felicity
Keeping
Cautious

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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
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It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
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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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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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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.
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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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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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Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
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I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.
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Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
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Damn words they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.
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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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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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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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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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