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Quotes About Comparison

Xingu! she scoffed. Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!
~ Edith Wharton
She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.
~ Edith Wharton
Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.
~ Edith Wharton
no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.
~ Edith Wharton
She knew that Virginia's survey of the world was limited to people, the clothes they wore, and the carriages they drove in. Her own universe was so crammed to bursting with wonderful sights and sounds that, in spite of her sense of Virginia's superiority - her beauty, her ease, her confidence - Nan sometimes felt a shamefaced pity for her.
~ Edith Wharton
At least, she continued, it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself -- she drew together her troubled brows -- but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.
~ Edith Wharton
Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't offer you?
~ Edith Wharton
The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in—two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.
~ Edith Wharton
The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
~ Edith Wharton
I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.
~ Edith Wharton
Every one knows you're a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you're not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.
~ Edith Wharton
The extravagance in dress—" Miss Jackson began. "Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry's dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them.
~ Edith Wharton
So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?" "No more than every married woman.
~ Edmund White
Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.
~ Edna Ferber
Mr Berry: We are not childhood sweethearts, we are not in the first flush of youth, we are not Romeo and Juliet. Mrs Berry: No ... we are the warring what's-their-names families of Romeo and Juliet.
~ Edna O'Brien
lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other's names. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice, all the size of her, boasting about the presents their husbands gave them for their birthdays
~ Edna O'Brien
Notwithstanding the propensity of mankind to exalt the past, and to depreciate the present
~ Edward Gibbon
Unsere Einschätzung des persönlichen Verdienstes richtet sich nach dem Durchschnittsmenschen. Die überragenden Leistungen eines Genies oder einer Tugend, sei es im tätigen oder im kontemplativen Leben, werden nicht nach ihrem absoluten Kulminationspunkt bemessen, sondern nach der Höhe, die sie über dem Durchschnitt ihres Jahrhunderts oder ihres Landes erreichen.
~ Edward Gibbon
I've decided that, as somebody's pointed out, the older you get, it's very difficult to tell how much younger anyone else is. I mean I can't really tell the difference now between people who are fifteen and people who are thirty-five.
~ Edward Gorey
Aprender acerca del presente a la luz del pasado quiere también decir aprender del pasado a la luz del presente. La función de la historia es la de estimular una mas profunda comprensión tanto del pasado como del presente por su comparación recíproca.
~ Edward Hallett Carr
She was a bit better to take than her husband, but she was a terrible cook and I seemed to be the only person at her dinner table that realized this.
~ Edward P. Jones
Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.
~ Edward St. Aubyn
If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that least mediocre of the mediocre is a discouraging title for a prize[.]
~ Edward St. Aubyn
He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people.
~ Edward St. Aubyn