Edith Wharton

How is it that reading her novel The Age of Innocence never gets old for me? I joked with my students recently about the fact that I am spending a little bit of every summer with Wharton, but I don't mind it. Especially on a day like today when, while grading a student essay, I came across this quote from her autobiography:
"One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways."
If there is a better motto to live by, I haven't found it.