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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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
Preliminary
Useful
Failure
Success

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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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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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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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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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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.
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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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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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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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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
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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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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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