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traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

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
Destroy
Hardest
Tradition
Meaning
Lost
Traditions

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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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I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
Edith Wharton
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
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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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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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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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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
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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?
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.
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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Edith Wharton
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If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
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Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Edith Wharton
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The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
Edith Wharton
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
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Each time you happen to me all over again.
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