Quote

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

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

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
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.
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 was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.
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
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
Image
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.
Edith Wharton
Image
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
Edith Wharton
Image
Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
Edith Wharton
Image
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
Image
For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
Edith Wharton
Image
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
Image
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
Edith Wharton
Image
She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
Edith Wharton
Image
... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
Edith Wharton
Image
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
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
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
Edith Wharton
Image
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
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
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton