It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Edith WhartonTags: america stupid copy old-world
I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no parting.
Edith WhartonTags: friendship-and-love
If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.
Edith WhartonTags: nature country-life
But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life.
Edith WhartonTheir 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 a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.
Edith WhartonIn the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once.
Edith WhartonYou see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's
powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and
took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;
but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a soi. And when one hears good
talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it
inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth
breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the
same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur,
to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earn
enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private' anything--is almost
as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge:
an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in New
York?
Tags: inspirational liberty journalism
I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary.
Edith WhartonMy little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet
But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned, and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la charté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes.
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