Quote

Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.

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
Wings
Dared
Move
Flocks
Least
Gather
Words
Butterfly
Reddened
Moving
Temples
Undisturbed
Speak
Motion
Startled
Left
Rare
Archer
Might
Drive
Flock

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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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I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.
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Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
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... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
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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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Life is made up of compromises.
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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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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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In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
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Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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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.
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If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
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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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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
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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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