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

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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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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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The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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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.
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Life is made up of compromises.
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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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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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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
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It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
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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.
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She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
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It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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