{"author":"Edith Wharton","author_id":"Edith+Wharton","total_quotes":114,"quotes":[{"text":"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["character","description"],"id":2317,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["compassion","empathy","love"],"id":4936,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. 'The House of Mirth.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["happiness","the-house-of-mirth"],"id":8347,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["language","music","paradox","understanding"],"id":18973,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["language"],"id":23600,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["writing"],"id":27491,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["happiness"],"id":33370,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["human-nature"],"id":39940,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["marriage"],"id":41618,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"},{"text":"The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.","author":"Edith Wharton","tags":["nature","universe"],"id":41910,"author_id":"Edith+Wharton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":114,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}