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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
People
Balls
Watching
Listening
Class
Firsts
Britons
Play
Dining
First
Imaginary
Like
Tennis

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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.
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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
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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.
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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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I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12 x 8 black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.
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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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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 role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
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... 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.
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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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people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
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Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
Margaret Halsey
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I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
Margaret Halsey
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I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
Margaret Halsey
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The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality
Margaret Halsey
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Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey