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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

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
Everybody
Doe
Anything
Much

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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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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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.
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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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In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
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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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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
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Life is made up of compromises.
Edith Wharton
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
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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.
Edith Wharton
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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
Edith Wharton
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
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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
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton