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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

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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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Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
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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.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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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
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Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
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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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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.
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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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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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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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.
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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
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The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Edith Wharton
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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
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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.
Edith Wharton