Quote

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

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
Men
Books
Moulded
Quality
Plasticity
Values
Proportionate
Form
Fresh
Thought
Forms
May
Impact
Book
Value
Things
Called

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
Edith Wharton
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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
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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
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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?
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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
Edith Wharton
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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
Edith Wharton
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
Edith Wharton
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there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
Edith Wharton