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"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe."
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"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."
"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life."
"The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points."
"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned."
"Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub."
"What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer."
"A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore."
"If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture."
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