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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

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
Life
Rope
Tight
Bed
Either
Literature
Give
Tightrope
Giving
Feather
Always
Feathers

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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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.
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I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
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I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
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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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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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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.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
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Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
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Damn words they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.
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She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
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