Quote

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

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
Break
Regarded
Moments
Breaks
Great
Shore
Curving
Narrative
Culminating
Dialogue
Watcher
Wave
Watchers
Towards
Spray
Fiction
Reserved

More quotes by Edith Wharton

Image
... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
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
I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.
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
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
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton
Image
Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
Edith Wharton
Image
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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
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
Image
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
Edith Wharton
Image
They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Edith Wharton
Image
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
Image
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton
Image
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton
Image
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
Image
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
Edith Wharton
Image
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