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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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
Apparently
Duty
Worst
Else
Anything
More quotes by Edith Wharton
I can't love you unless I give you up.
Edith Wharton
What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
Edith Wharton
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
Edith Wharton
They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
Edith Wharton
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.
Edith Wharton
Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
Edith Wharton
Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
Edith Wharton
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton
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
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.
Edith Wharton
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Edith Wharton
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith Wharton
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
Edith Wharton
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
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.
Edith Wharton