Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.
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I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
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Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.
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Self-admiration giveth much consolation.
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Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.
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Success is a great healer.
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Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.
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Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?
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The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.
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The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
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There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.
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The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.
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... France is the genius among nations.
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A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?
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Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.
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The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.
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Stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.
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No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.
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All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.
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We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.
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Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.
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Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!
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Fame compensates for a column of wants.
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Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.