Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 6

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He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

Edith Wharton

Sea, Sky, Vision

Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.449, Simon and Schuster

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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Edith Wharton

Breakfast, Bananas, Shame

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...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Edith Wharton

People, Literature, Lines

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4525, Delphi Classics

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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.

Edith Wharton

Daughter, Mother, Children

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2743, Delphi Classics

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She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

Edith Wharton

Hate, Dark, Light

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.764, Delphi Classics

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The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.

Edith Wharton

Distance, Giving, Warning

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I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

Edith Wharton

Cogs, Machines, Use

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.791, Delphi Classics

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Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

Edith Wharton

Helping, Remember, Moments

Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.275, VM eBooks

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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.

Edith Wharton

Long, People, Half

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3200, Delphi Classics

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To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Edith Wharton

Generations, Furniture, Gas

Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Collier Books, 1989

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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

Self, Rejects You, No Turning Back

Edith Wharton (2010). “The House of Mirth”, p.163, Giunti Editore

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Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

Edith Wharton

Real, Flower, Dust

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There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

Edith Wharton

Fate, Destiny, Men

Edith Wharton (2012). “The Age of Innocence”, p.228, Courier Corporation

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Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

Edith Wharton

War, Years, People

Ethan Frome ch. 7 (1911)

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They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

Edith Wharton

Groups, Puppets, Gestures

Edith Wharton (2016). “The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton”, p.47, VM eBooks

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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Edith Wharton

Country, Stupid, America

Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.209, Bibliolis Books

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I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.

Edith Wharton

Flames, Two, Yesterday

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2147, Delphi Classics

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Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them .

Edith Wharton

Giving, Faithful, Lovers

"The letters of Edith Wharton".

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whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

Edith Wharton

Use, World, Rooms

Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman (2015). “The Decoration of Houses”, p.22, Courier Dover Publications

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What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

Edith Wharton

Happiness, Fate, Thinking

Edith Wharton (2016). “A Backward Glance”, p.128, Edith Wharton

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The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

Edith Wharton

Real, Secret, Gold

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.581, Delphi Classics

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It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

Edith Wharton

Wicked, Wrong Person, Persons

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.4119, Delphi Classics

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He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Edith Wharton

Loneliness, Winter, Profound

Ethan Frome preface (1911)

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And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.

Edith Wharton

Reality, Vision, Looks

Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2147, Delphi Classics

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Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

Edith Wharton

Archer, Thinking, People

Edith Wharton (2010). “The Age of Innocence”, p.101, Bibliolis Books

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Born: January 24, 1862
Died: August 11, 1937
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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