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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
Made
Misfortune
Misfortunes
Pliable
Substance
Stiffness
Instead
Hardening
Break
Supple
Literature
Lily
Less
Stiff
Easy
Lilies
More quotes by Edith Wharton
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats but they were not sown more than once.
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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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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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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
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[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
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For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
Edith Wharton
It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
Edith Wharton
It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
Edith Wharton
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith Wharton
To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
Edith Wharton
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
Edith Wharton
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
Edith Wharton