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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
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Despairing
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Unattainable
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Lottery
Thing
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Something
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Would
Prize
Life
Flower
More quotes by Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
Edith Wharton
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
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
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
Edith Wharton
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Edith Wharton
She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
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.
Edith Wharton
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
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
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
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
Edith Wharton
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
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton