Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.
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Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.
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A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.
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Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.
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Power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.
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Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.
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The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
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... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.
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The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.
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A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.
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New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.
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Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.
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... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.
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Orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.
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Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
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No loose fish enters our quiet bay.
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Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.
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Genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.
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The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.
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Alexander Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
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It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.
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Her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.
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The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.
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California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.