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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

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
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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.
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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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.
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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
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Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
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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 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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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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Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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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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Example is better than precept.
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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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Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.
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