Edith Wharton - Quodid

About

Picture of Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Wharton (; née Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of upper-class New York society to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Her other well-known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

Quotes from Edith Wharton

I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them — children, duties, visits, bores, relations: the things that protect married people from each other.

—Edith Wharton

love relationships people children marriage

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

—Edith Wharton

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

—Edith Wharton

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

happiness misery comfort fun

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

—Edith Wharton

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

—Edith Wharton

freedom death universe old age

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

—Edith Wharton

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

—Edith Wharton

maturity art novelty

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

—Edith Wharton

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

—Edith Wharton

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

—Edith Wharton

pain marriage misery

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

—Edith Wharton

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

—Edith Wharton

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

—Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

—Edith Wharton

vision originality