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

About Edith Wharton

Portrait 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...

More quotations from Edith Wharton

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

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

My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.

—Edith Wharton

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

—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

More quotations tagged with “old age”

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

love old age marriage conversation talking

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.

—George Burns

life age immortality old age

I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.

—From a 1975 interview with Mick Jagger, who still performs the song at age sixty-seven

satisfaction death old age

I used to say, watching two elderly women crossing the street in flowered hats, holding each other's arms, "Look at those cute old ladies." I didn't mind the stereotypes that pepper movies and television shows. Now old people are no longer cute or mean or silly or wise to me. They are people, in all their broken fullness. Despite the glitches in faculties and functioning, anyone who's lived that long has learned something the rest of us don't know.

humanity old age fullness

Even very recently, the elders could say [to the youths]: "You know, I have been young and you never have been old." But today's young people can reply: "You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be."… This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

—Margaret Mead

now generations experience world youth old age

History

11 Jul 2015 Added