"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."

Wharton, Edith on Decisions
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"A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."

Wharton, Edith on Divorce
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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!"

Wharton, Edith on Exile
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"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

Wharton, Edith on Giving
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"There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow."

Wharton, Edith on Age and Aging
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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."

Wharton, Edith on America
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"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."

Wharton, Edith on Happiness
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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."

Wharton, Edith on Literature
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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."

Wharton, Edith on Marriage
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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?"

Wharton, Edith on Patriotism
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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."

Wharton, Edith on Bankers and Banking
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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"

Wharton, Edith on Problems
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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."

Wharton, Edith on Critics and Criticism
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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."

Wharton, Edith on Culture
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