Edith Wharton

Novelist, Short Story Writer

Edith Wharton was a prominent American novelist known for her keen social commentary and exploration of love, particularly in works like 'The Age of Innocence'.

Born
January 1, 1862
Died
August 11, 1937
Quotes
254
Rank
#430

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Edith Wharton quotes (page 13 of 13)

254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Edith Wharton Novelist, Short Story Writer
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"Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects —hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles — made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances. 'It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: "Use unknown".'"

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"There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask."

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"She would not have put herself out so much to say so little."

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"Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven."

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"If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth."

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"Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes."

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"[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people."

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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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"Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity."

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"...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it."

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"Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them." Mark Twain "...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written."

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"Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings."

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"Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood."

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"...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."

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