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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

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
Time
Memorable
Pretty
Stop
Happiness
Happy
Women
Trying
Good

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The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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... 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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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
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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.
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there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
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...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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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.
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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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
Edith Wharton