Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Edith Wharton
Image
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Edith Wharton
Image
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
Edith Wharton
Image
Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
Image
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
Image
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
Image
I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
Image
Each time you happen to me all over again.
Edith Wharton
Image
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
Edith Wharton
Image
I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
Edith Wharton
Image
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton