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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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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
Functions
Providence
Prefer
Shouldn
Usurping
Destruction
Shrunk
Function
Errand
Exercise
Decidedly
Always
Errands
More quotes by Edith Wharton
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
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.
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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
Habit is necessary it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Edith Wharton
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Edith Wharton
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
Edith Wharton
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
Edith Wharton
The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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
... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
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
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
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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