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It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

Agnes Repplier

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Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Office
Fiction
Teach
Show
Business
Shows
Novelist
Anything
Novelists
Behave

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

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There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
Agnes Repplier
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It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.
Agnes Repplier
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The tourist may complain of other tourists but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.
Agnes Repplier
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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
Agnes Repplier
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Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
Agnes Repplier
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There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.
Agnes Repplier
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The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.
Agnes Repplier
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There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
Agnes Repplier
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A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.
Agnes Repplier
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Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
Agnes Repplier
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I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Agnes Repplier
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the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
Agnes Repplier
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Wit is artificial humor is natural. Wit is accidental humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
Agnes Repplier
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
Agnes Repplier
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There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
Agnes Repplier
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The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
Agnes Repplier
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The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
Agnes Repplier
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Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?
Agnes Repplier
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By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.
Agnes Repplier
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Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
Agnes Repplier