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The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

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
Sound
Desire
Form
Inveterate
Wells
Symmetry
Human
Instincts
Humans
Rhythm
Well
Instinct
Balance

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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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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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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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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
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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.
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In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats but they were not sown more than once.
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