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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.
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
Vast
Neglecting
Group
Executed
Groups
Belonged
Single
Puppets
Human
Surrounding
Humans
Gestures
Without
Neglect
Life
Perform
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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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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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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
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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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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
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I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.
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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
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The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
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He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
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I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
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She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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