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"A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature."
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"I can't remember exactly when I started to steal, but I do remember being aware of the fact that if I wanted to enjoy myself and be popular, money was the way to do it."

"It is astounding what power being kind, mannered, polite and considerate has in transforming your life."

"He reached up and tugged his ear. And I did the same."

"There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton

"Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!"

"I suppose 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."

"One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop."

"If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it."

"What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest."

"You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!"

"We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop."

"The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears."

"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."

"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."
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