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

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I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
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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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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.
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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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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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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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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
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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The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
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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The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.
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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In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret Halsey