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Life is made up of compromises.

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
Compromises
Compromise
Made
Life

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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.
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Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
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I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.
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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.
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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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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.
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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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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One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
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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 value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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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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Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
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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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Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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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
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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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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
Edith Wharton