Quote

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

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
Mother
Snow
Manufactured
Order
Image
Smashing
Wanted
Supposed
Aunt
Might
Exercise
Conspiracy
Factitious
Right
Creation
Oppressed
Lordly
Made
Dead
Mothers
Cunningly
Long
Pleasure
Purity
Aunts
Like
Felt
Grandmother
Grandmothers

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It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
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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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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
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Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
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I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.
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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.
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I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
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I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
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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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It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
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The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
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She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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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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Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
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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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To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
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