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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

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
Obligation
Art
Beautiful
Firsts
First
Make
Things
Obligations
Useful

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I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
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I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy I should want some one who made it interesting.
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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.
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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]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.
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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.
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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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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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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.
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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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
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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.
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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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The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
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Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
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