Quote

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.

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
Men
Books
Moulded
Quality
Plasticity
Values
Proportionate
Form
Fresh
Thought
Forms
May
Impact
Book
Value
Things
Called

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
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It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now
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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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It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
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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.
Edith Wharton
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Edith Wharton
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There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
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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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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
Edith Wharton
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Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
Edith Wharton
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She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.
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The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
Edith Wharton
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Edith Wharton
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton
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Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
Edith Wharton
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There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
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.
Edith Wharton
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The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Edith Wharton
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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.
Edith Wharton
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Edith Wharton