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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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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
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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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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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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Edith Wharton
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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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Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
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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.
Edith Wharton
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
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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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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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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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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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Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
Edith Wharton
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
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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
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Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Edith Wharton