Quote

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

Janet Flanner

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Janet Flanner
Age: 86 †
Born: 1892
Born: March 13
Died: 1978
Died: November 7
Film Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Translator
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Way
Paper
Bureaucracy
Like
Move
Signals
Pinning
Written
Sheets
Specimen
Passion
Steel
Insect
Moving
German
Signal
Individual
French
Sheet
Form
Forms
Pins
Work
Exist
Insects

More quotes by Janet Flanner

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Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.
Janet Flanner
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When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.
Janet Flanner
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In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.
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When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.
Janet Flanner
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Never have nights been more beautiful than these nights of anxiety. In the sky have been shining in trinity the moon, Venus and Mars. Nature has been more splendid than man.
Janet Flanner
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[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.
Janet Flanner
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Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.
Janet Flanner
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[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.
Janet Flanner
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Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.
Janet Flanner
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... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.
Janet Flanner
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The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.
Janet Flanner
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I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth.
Janet Flanner
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I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.
Janet Flanner
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I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.
Janet Flanner