Quote by Edith Wharton: “If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”

Chasing happiness directly often makes it more elusive. Wharton is pointing out that the pressure to feel happy, to achieve happiness as a goal, gets in the way of simply enjoying whatever is in front of you. Life gets better when you release the demand that it be perfect.

Wharton was at the height of her creative output in the early twentieth century. The House of Mirth appeared in 1905, and her letters from this period are full of wry observations about the performance of happiness in upper-class life.

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.