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"Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience..."
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"The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe."
"A little girl loves her bird - Why? Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless? A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes."
"If I ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking."
"Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy - just a boy."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest."
"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."
"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."
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
"Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites."
"Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one."
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