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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1862
Born: January 24
Died: 1937
Died: August 11
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Edith Newbold Jones
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Women
Ways
Mirrors
Positivity
Resilient
Way
Wisdom
Spirituality
Candle
Resilience
Thinking
Knowledge
Reflection
Empowering
Lamps
Resiliency
Life
Peace
Spread
Novelists
Reflects
Mirroring
Spiritual
Kindness
Birthday
Graduation
Candlelight
Inspirational
Positive
Caring
Reflecting
Outreach
Two
Attitude
Appreciation
Volunteer
Torches
Light
Leader
Mirror
Uplifting
Spreading
More quotes by Edith Wharton
It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
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He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
Edith Wharton
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Edith Wharton
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
Edith Wharton
Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
Edith Wharton
She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
Edith Wharton
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
Edith Wharton
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
Edith Wharton
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Edith Wharton
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
Edith Wharton
It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family.
Edith Wharton
She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.
Edith Wharton
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
Edith Wharton
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith Wharton
Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.
Edith Wharton
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
Edith Wharton