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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.

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
Misfortunes
Pliable
Substance
Stiffness
Instead
Hardening
Break
Supple
Literature
Lily
Less
Stiff
Easy
Lilies
Made
Misfortune

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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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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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Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.
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Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
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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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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
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And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
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There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
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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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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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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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I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
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... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
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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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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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