Quote by Edith Wharton: “It was the old human predicament: how to get through the intervening stages of one's life.”

This quote captures the universal challenge of navigating the often mundane or difficult periods between significant life events. It speaks to the human struggle of enduring waiting and transition, a feeling many experience throughout life.

Wharton's characters frequently grappled with feelings of entrapment and unfulfilled desires within the strictures of New York high society, making this predicament a central theme of her critiques of social constraints.

American novelist and short story writer who chronicled the social mores of Gilded Age New York with devastating precision and irony. Her novel The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making her the first woman to receive the award.