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A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

William Maxwell

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People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much...But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
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If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
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I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.
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What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.
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In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.
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My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.
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The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters
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The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.
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Your reader is at least as bright as you are
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Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
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Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
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Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
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If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
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