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If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

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
Part
Symmetry
May
Answering
Good
Breeding
Sanity
Proportion
Architecture
Defined
Another
Decoration

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Damn words they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.
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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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Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
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Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
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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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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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In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
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He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
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She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
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She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
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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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