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Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.

Wilfrid Sheed

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Wilfrid Sheed
Age: 80 †
Born: 1930
Born: December 27
Died: 2011
Died: January 19
Novelist
London
England
Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed
Much
Test
Made
Saint
Always
Tests
Fuss
Handle
Saints
Hero
Heroes
Mankind
Latter
Called
Final
Might
Finals

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How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
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Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of 'National Geographics,' is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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For Catholics before Vatican II, the land of the free was pre-eminently the land of Sister Says-except, of course, for Sister, for whom it was the land of Father Says.
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The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. Scattered showers, periods of sunshine.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.
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I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.
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Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.
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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
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