{
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/junichiro-tanizaki/in-praise-of-shadows/the-older-we-get",
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  "text": "The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past. Old people a century ago wanted to go back two centuries, and two centuries ago they wished it were three centuries earlier. Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with. But in recent years the pace of progress has been so precipitous that conditions in our own country go somewhat beyond the ordinary. The changes that have taken place since the Restoration of 1867 must be at least as great as those of the preceding three and a half centuries.",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Junichiro Tanizaki",
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  "book": {
    "title": "In Praise of Shadows",
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  "page": 39,
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    {
      "name": "old age",
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    {
      "name": "the past",
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      "slug": "whenever-i-see",
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      "text": "Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small comer of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.",
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      "id": "9caf1b41-530c-46c0-a7d5-c5598f529279",
      "slug": "were-it-not",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/junichiro-tanizaki/in-praise-of-shadows/were-it-not",
      "text": "Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.",
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      "slug": "such-is-our",
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      "text": "Such is our way of thinking — we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.",
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