The only thing to do is to hug one’s friends tight and do one’s job.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Friendship, Work
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Happiness
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
—Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Charity, Knowledge, Helping, Service, Giving
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
Topics: Marriage
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
Topics: Habit
The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.
—Edith Wharton
When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Decisions
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Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
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Zora Neale Hurston American Novelist
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Emily Post American Writer, Socialite