Edith Wharton: We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

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

Edith Wharton

birthday inspirational life

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

life-and-death curiosity intellectual

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

Edith Wharton

emotion reason men

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Edith Wharton

mirth half life-is

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

Edith Wharton

self house believe

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton

loneliness real people

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

Edith Wharton

drawing house doors

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. 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.

Edith Wharton

routine age writing

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

Edith Wharton

upkeep crumbling needs

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

Edith Wharton

bed giving life

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Edith Wharton

inspirational people travel

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

Edith Wharton

silence literature may

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

Edith Wharton

mirth tolerance scene

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

patriotic country thinking

Each time you happen to me all over again.

Edith Wharton

happens love romantic

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

Edith Wharton

carpe-diem enjoy-life action

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

Edith Wharton

trouble men

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

Edith Wharton

keys real two

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

Edith Wharton

enough easy world

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

Edith Wharton

mind want book