It’s often said that with great risk comes great reward. Writer Edith Wharton may have been born into an upper-class life, but she wasn’t necessarily content with the ease it offered. Her work, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Age of Innocence,” often explored the tension between society’s expectations and her own desires. This quote, taken from one of Wharton’s journal entries in 1926, underlines her feeling that life can be either comfortable or risky based on one’s choices. Wharton knew that the easy way isn’t always the most fulfilling, and that to move ahead we must be willing to take chances.