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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

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
Common
Symptom
Fear
Immature
Art
Symptoms
Another
Dread
Done
Element
Elements
Modern
Unsettling
Literature
Immaturity

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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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But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.
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There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
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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.
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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.
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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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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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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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I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
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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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Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
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