Quotes by Edith Wharton
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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.
My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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.
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
If we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
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.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be 'American' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
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