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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

Margaret Halsey

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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
First
Imaginary
Like
Tennis
People
Balls
Watching
Listening
Class
Firsts
Britons
Play
Dining

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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
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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.
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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.
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The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
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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
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
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The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
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The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
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The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.
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Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
Margaret Halsey
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The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret Halsey
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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret Halsey
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A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.
Margaret Halsey
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Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
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Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.
Margaret Halsey