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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

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

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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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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.
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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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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.
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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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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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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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... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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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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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
Edith Wharton
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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've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
Edith Wharton
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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith Wharton
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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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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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