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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
Worst
Else
Anything
Apparently
Duty

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
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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.
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
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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.
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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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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Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
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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.
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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
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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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