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Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Gerald Brenan

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Gerald Brenan
Age: 92 †
Born: 1894
Born: April 7
Died: 1987
Died: January 16
Hispanist
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Writer
Edward FitzGerald Brenan
Circus
Crack
Cracks
Recalcitrant
Vain
Unskilled
Animals
Trainer
Animal
Whip
Words
Trainers
Language
Whips

More quotes by Gerald Brenan

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Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for.
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We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.
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The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.
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The cliche is dead poetry.
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Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.
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It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
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Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.
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As Coleridge said, We receive but what we give. The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.
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Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.
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One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
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You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.
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Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.
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The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
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We should all live as if we were never going to die, for it is the deaths of our friends that hurt us, not our own.
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We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.
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The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
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Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
Gerald Brenan