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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
Providence
Prefer
Shouldn
Usurping
Destruction
Shrunk
Function
Errand
Exercise
Decidedly
Always
Errands
Functions
More quotes by 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
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.
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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
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
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
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Edith Wharton
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
Edith Wharton
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
Edith Wharton
Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
Edith Wharton
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
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.
Edith Wharton
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Edith Wharton
... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Edith Wharton
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
Edith Wharton
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Edith Wharton
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Edith Wharton
The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
Edith Wharton
Each time you happen to me all over again.
Edith Wharton
She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
Edith Wharton