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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
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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
Much
Dignity
Long
Mere
Years
Became
Appetites
Battle
Shown
Marriage
Appetite
Duty
Dull
Together
Kept
Matter
Ugly
More quotes by Edith Wharton
[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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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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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
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
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.
Edith Wharton
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
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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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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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He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
Edith Wharton
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
Edith Wharton
... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
Edith Wharton
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats but they were not sown more than once.
Edith Wharton
Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
Edith Wharton