"You must not think I do not admire and really adore this American character, which is now growing up, even while it is so easy to laugh at and even sometimes hate. Depend upon it it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up, it prevents you realising that in America everything hitherto respected including your politeness and reticence is quite out of date. Every day of my life, I meet with some fresh surprise. People will do and say anything, and except a few things like the multiplication table, nothing is sacred."
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Letter to Ruth Hart, written from New York (July 3, 1912); Joseph Hone (ed.) Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922 (1944), p. 142. Cited in Mark Pachter; Frances Wein (eds.) Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776–1914 (1976), p. 261
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Butler_Yeats
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John Butler Yeats
John Butler Yeats RHA (16 March 1839 – 3 February 1922) was an Irish artist and the father of W. B. Yeats, Lily Yeats, Elizabeth Corbett "Lollie" Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats. The National Gallery of Ireland holds a number of his portraits in oil and works on paper, including one of his portraits of his son William, painted in 1900.
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