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... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

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
Takes
Englishman
Wells
Bred
Well
Englishmen
Great
Convincing
Proof
Produce
Deal
Deals
Ennui

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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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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... 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
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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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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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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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
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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Example is better than precept.
Margaret Halsey
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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
Margaret Halsey
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
Margaret Halsey
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In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret Halsey
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The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
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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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.
Margaret Halsey
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A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
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
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey