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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
Beautiful
Firsts
First
Make
Things
Obligations
Useful
Obligation
Art

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He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
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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.
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What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
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She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
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To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
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The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
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It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than scenes, except those who gave rise to them.
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I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.
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I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
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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.
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
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Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
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