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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
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
She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
Edith Wharton
I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
Edith Wharton
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.
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
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
Edith Wharton
But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.
Edith Wharton
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton
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
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Edith Wharton
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
Edith Wharton
She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
Edith Wharton
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
Edith Wharton
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
Edith Wharton
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
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
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Edith Wharton
