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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
Nests
Insects
Sustain
Thread
Insect
Vanity
Threads
Weight
Hangs
Human
Nest
Humans
Frail
More quotes by Edith Wharton
He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
Edith Wharton
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
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
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
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
Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
Edith Wharton
[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
Edith Wharton
She was very near hating him now yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
Edith Wharton
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
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
Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.
Edith Wharton
She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
Edith Wharton
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Edith Wharton
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
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.
Edith Wharton
In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edith Wharton
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
Edith Wharton