"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
"My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!"
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Source: Edith Wharton (2006). “Summer”, p.3, Courier Corporation
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