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She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.
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The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?
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Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
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If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
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Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain.
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my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.
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'Look here, old sport, ... what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.
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If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
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My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
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Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
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They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.
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You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
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Action is character.
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A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
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There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.
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Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
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He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. 'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all - '
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To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
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I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
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I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
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The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.
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You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.
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Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.
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We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.