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I can't love you unless I give you up.

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
Unless
Give
Giving
Love

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Edith Wharton
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For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
Edith Wharton
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It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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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The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Edith Wharton
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If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
Edith Wharton
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Edith Wharton
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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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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
Edith Wharton
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
Edith Wharton
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton