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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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Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.
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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.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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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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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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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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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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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.
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
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Each time you happen to me all over 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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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
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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.
Edith Wharton