"Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose."
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Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 9 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession."
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"What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out."
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"It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country."
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"Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas."
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"In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert."
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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."
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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."
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"We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!"
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"Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?"
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"She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her."
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"Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on."
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"It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be"
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"The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future."
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"She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves."
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"Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?"
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"With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other."
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"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore."
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"But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart."
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"Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo."
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