"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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Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 8 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is the omnipresent rush of water which give the Este Gardens their peculiar character. From the Anio, drawn up the hillside at incalculable cost and labour, a thousand rills gush downward, terrace by terrace, channeling the stone rails of the balusters, leaping from step to step, dripping into mossy conches, flashing in spray from the horns of sea-gods and the jaws of mythical monsters, or forcing themselves in irrepressible overflow down the ivy-matted banks."
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"Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites."
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"I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them."
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"... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle."
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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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"The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."
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"In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time."
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"...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert."
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"Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."
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"It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them."
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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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"As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep"
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"And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow."
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"... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain."
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"One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written."
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"For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins."
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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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"I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other."
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"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone."
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