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The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.

Alice James

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Alice James
Age: 43 †
Born: 1848
Born: August 7
Died: 1892
Died: March 6
Diarist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Never
Complacency
Tested
Gain
Simmer
Measure
Inactive
Gains
Recluse
Conscious
Soak
Failure
Perpetually
Nothing
Counted

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It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!
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The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape
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I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.
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Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected.
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How heroic to be able to suppress one's vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.
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How sick one gets of being good, how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours embody selfishness.
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Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?
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Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.
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The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?
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I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.
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Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumle along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?
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How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.
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If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.
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Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.
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It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.
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What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.
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Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by the way?
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What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, -- form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.
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One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
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Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.
Alice James