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To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
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The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
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In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
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To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
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At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
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Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
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All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase- 'I love you.' (From: The Offshore Pirate)
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She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
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My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
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Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
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Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
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Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
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For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
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You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.
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He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
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The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
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Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
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No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
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Forgotten is forgiven.
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There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.
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Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
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After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
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Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
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It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.