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

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
Edith Wharton
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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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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.
Edith Wharton
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To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
Edith Wharton
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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.
Edith Wharton
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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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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In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats but they were not sown more than once.
Edith Wharton
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One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton