They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Edith WhartonRead
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Valuing the ability to confront and accept life's realities over material comforts.
Edith Wharton's quote emphasizes the importance of facing life honestly and openly as the greatest achievement one can aspire to. The metaphor of living in a garret, a small and often uncomfortable space, signifies that enduring hardships is worthwhile if it leads to genuine living and understanding of oneself and the world.
Themes
LifeTruthExistenceMeaningAuthenticity
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about embracing challenges, one might quote this to highlight the value of authenticity over comfort.
More from Edith Wharton
All quotes βThey seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith WhartonRead
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Edith WhartonRead
And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
Edith WhartonRead
As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each otherβs angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep
Edith WhartonRead
There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
Edith WhartonRead
Similar quotes
So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
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One of the shocks of a 50th birthday is realizing the fundamental fact that your youth is irrevocably over.
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There's two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing. And it's different on every shore. And living... well... There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashing of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with the same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke a thought aloud, 'Why doesn't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrads, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.
Ernest LawrenceRead
Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness--if you had little time left to live--you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you...you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason--or you will never be at all.
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She is a water bug on the surface of life.
Gloria SteinemRead