Quote

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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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Living
Seventh
Years
Constitutes
Life
Introduction
Like
Surface
English
Merely
England
Eighths
Year
Iceberg

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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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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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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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The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality
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It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
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when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
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the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.
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Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
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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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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
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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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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 conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
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Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
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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.
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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.
Margaret Halsey