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"What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."
"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."
"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."
"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."
"Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them-children, duties, visits, bores, relations-the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together-that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls."
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