People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications. Edith Wharton More Quotes by Edith Wharton More Quotes From Edith Wharton I begin 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 twochildrenthinking She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company. Edith Wharton solitudetastejoy As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. Edith Wharton paincompassionhealing 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 musicitalianartist True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. Edith Wharton originalityvisionliterature 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 mindrunninghappiness I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast. Edith Wharton despairbeautyamerica Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon. Edith Wharton dustflowerreal 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 intellectuallongpast Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events. Edith Wharton eventsfallthinking A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. Edith Wharton belovedclassicdefinitions There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. Edith Wharton selfbest-friendfriendship It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness. Edith Wharton vanityselfbelieve I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us. Edith Wharton eyeanimalthinking whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself. Edith Wharton useroomsworld Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences. Edith Wharton irritatedinnocencediscovery I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light. Edith Wharton lonelynightchildren ...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not. Edith Wharton cleverliarsgiving ... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump. Edith Wharton libraryhousebook 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 freedomartthinking
