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Age
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There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
-Edith Wharton
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America
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I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
-Edith Wharton
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Art
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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
-Edith Wharton
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Banks / Banking
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There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
-Edith Wharton
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Books
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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.
-Edith Wharton
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Charity
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-Edith Wharton
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Criticism
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
-Edith Wharton
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Culture
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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.
-Edith Wharton
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Decisions
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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
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Divorce
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A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
-Edith Wharton
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Exile
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My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!
-Edith Wharton
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Friends
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There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.
-Edith Wharton
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Happiness
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If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
-Edith Wharton
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Language
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
-Edith Wharton
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Marriage
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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.
-Edith Wharton
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Mirrors
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There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
-Edith Wharton
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Patriotism
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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?
-Edith Wharton
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Problems
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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
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Books by and about Edith Wharton