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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.

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
Upsets
Tea
Cups
Upset
Full
Never

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In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
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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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But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
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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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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
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It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
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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 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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Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
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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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I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
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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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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
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... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
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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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We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
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