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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

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
Asks
Half
Doesn
Take
Long
Always
Time
Letter
People
Letters

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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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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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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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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.
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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.
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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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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.
Edith Wharton
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Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
Edith Wharton
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The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
Edith Wharton
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
Edith Wharton
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He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
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She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
Edith Wharton
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton