Even though I read and write a lot of future-focused fiction, so many of my favorite books would be classified as classics. I thought that just made me old-school until Edith Wharton enlightened me today.

Edith let me know I just have a taste for stories with ‘irrepressible freshness’. True, her ‘classics’ were different from those works I now think of as classics, but it still applies.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

– Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University