“The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.”

American writer and designer

Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Born in 1862 and active in the early 20th century, she is known for fiction that drew on her knowledge of upper-class New York society, especially the manners and constraints of the Gilded Age. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, becoming the first woman to receive it. Her best-known works also include The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories, which helped define her reputation for sharp social realism and careful observation.