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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

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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
Points
Critics
Criticism
Weak
Rather
Bewildering
Others
Overlook
Wells
Glitter
Well
Invent

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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
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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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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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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.
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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
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I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
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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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It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
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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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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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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.
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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
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