She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
Edith WhartonThey seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith WhartonLeisure, 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