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I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.

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
Saints
Saint
Believe

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.
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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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
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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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?
Edith Wharton
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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Edith Wharton
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I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
Edith Wharton
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One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
Edith Wharton
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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
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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
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Edith Wharton
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What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
Edith Wharton
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
Edith Wharton
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton