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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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
Sustain
Thread
Insect
Vanity
Threads
Weight
Hangs
Human
Nest
Humans
Frail
Nests
Insects
More quotes by Edith Wharton
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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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.
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
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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
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
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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
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.
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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.
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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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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
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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.
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Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
Edith Wharton
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Edith Wharton
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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She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
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
And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
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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.
Edith Wharton