Quote

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
Human
Surrounding
Humans
Gestures
Without
Neglect
Life
Perform
Vast
Neglecting
Group
Executed
Groups
Belonged
Single
Puppets

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For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
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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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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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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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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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Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
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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.
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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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.
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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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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.
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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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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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