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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

Image
Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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.
Margaret Halsey
Image
American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
Image
I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... 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
Image
the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Example is better than precept.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
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