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Edith Wharton Inspirational Quotes (144)

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And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Edith Wharton
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.
Edith Wharton
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
Edith Wharton
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I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
Edith Wharton
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... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
Edith Wharton
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...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Edith Wharton
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Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
Edith Wharton
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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
Edith Wharton
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I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
Edith Wharton
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She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
Edith Wharton
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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edith Wharton
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
Edith Wharton
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Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
Edith Wharton
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
Edith Wharton
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Habit is necessary it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Edith Wharton
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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
Edith Wharton
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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
Edith Wharton
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith Wharton
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He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
Edith Wharton
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
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Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.
Edith Wharton
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For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
Edith Wharton
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In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
Edith Wharton
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