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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.

William Maxwell

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William Maxwell
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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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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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Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
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It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
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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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If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
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My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.
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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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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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