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Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
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
First
Lottery
Thing
Missed
Something
Drawn
Would
Prize
Life
Flower
Like
Knew
Despairing
Thought
Unattainable
Firsts
Improbable
More quotes by Edith Wharton
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
Life is made up of compromises.
Edith Wharton
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
Edith Wharton
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
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
Edith Wharton
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
Edith Wharton
Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
Edith Wharton
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
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
Edith Wharton
Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
Edith Wharton
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
Edith Wharton
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
Edith Wharton