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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
Thing
Signs
Kind
Innocence
Never
Lived
World
Reality
Thought
Hieroglyphic
Done
Hieroglyphics
Real
Represented
Even
Arbitrary

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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
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The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
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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.
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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
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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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Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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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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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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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.
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
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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.
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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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