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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

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
Children
English
Never
Books
Knowing
American
Spokes
Read
Spoke
Mother
Author
Book
Popular
Without
Allowed

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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
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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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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.
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
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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.
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