Quote

Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.

Margaret Halsey

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Beautiful
Provincial
Must
England
Like
Married
Humor
Stupid
Wife
Funny
Living
Exquisitely

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

Image
you have to realize the white-supremacy boys are spoiled children. 'I want my way,' they scream, and like all spoiled children, they advance no justification for it except that it is their way.
Margaret Halsey
Image
We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.
Margaret Halsey
Image
the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
Image
English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret Halsey
Image
in race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.
Margaret Halsey
Image
I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret Halsey
Image
This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
Image
It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
Margaret Halsey
Image
I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
Margaret Halsey
Image
it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey