Edith Wharton Quotes
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Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
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Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
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I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
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The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
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It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
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Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
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The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
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He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain - No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth's millions.
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
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What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
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I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
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Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
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In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
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To James's intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.
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When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
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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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In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
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Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
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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.