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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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
Nation
Beauty
Nations
Sense
Bananas
Without
Breakfast
Developing
Shame
Eating

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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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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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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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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.
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
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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.
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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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.
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Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
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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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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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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.
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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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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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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
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