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In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.

William Maxwell

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William Maxwell
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The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.
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It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
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Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.
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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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If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
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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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The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
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A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.
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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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I am the cat that walks alone.
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His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
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Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
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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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Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.
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Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.
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It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
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Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
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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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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.
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