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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

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
Lost
Traditions
Destroy
Hardest
Tradition
Meaning

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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
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Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
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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 frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
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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?
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Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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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.
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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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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
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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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She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.
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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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