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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.

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
Safer
Fond
Dangerous
People

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There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
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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
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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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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.
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It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
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Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Edith Wharton
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She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
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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.
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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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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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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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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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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Edith Wharton
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
Edith Wharton
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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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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
Edith Wharton
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She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
Edith Wharton
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Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
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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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