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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.
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
Done
Hieroglyphics
Real
Represented
Even
Arbitrary
Thing
Signs
Kind
Innocence
Never
Lived
World
Reality
Thought
Hieroglyphic
More quotes by Edith Wharton
Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.
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.
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
Edith Wharton
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
... caprice is as ruinous as routine.
Edith Wharton
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton
He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
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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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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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.
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In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats but they were not sown more than once.
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
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
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
Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
Edith Wharton
She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
Edith Wharton