Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.
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Nothing in life is more corroding than habit.
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There is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.
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Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.
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The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.
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Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.
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If there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?
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It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.
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In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.
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The final result of too much routine is death in life.
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It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.
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Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so.
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No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.
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Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.
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I have come to the conclusion that the modern interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is something like this: I am as good as those that think themselves better and a long sight better than those who only think themselves as good.
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There is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.
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The best of all good friends is pride.
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When I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.
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If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.
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The only revenge worth having is success.
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There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.
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I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.
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I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.