Dame Poverty gave me my name, And Pain godfathered me.
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Still falls the rain -- dark as the world of man, black as our loss -- blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.
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But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stayInvention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studys blows...Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,Fool, said my Muse to me look in thy heart and write.
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He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.
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A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
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I'm not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
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Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
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If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed a good idea at the time.'
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An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.
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The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
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I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
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Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one's own life.
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An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame -- Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.
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Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to The March of the Women from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known.
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We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that we choose death.
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Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy. After a war it seems more like astrology.
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The living blind and seeing Dead together lie As if in love . . . There was no more hating then,...
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I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
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A great actress, from the waist down.
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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which made it certain that what they dread shall happen.
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He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays - cynical, but hopeful.
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I have a lot of respect for that dame [Delilah]. There's one lady barber that made good.
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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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She looks like something that would eat its young.
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We've got some real challenges ahead. Obviously they start with Notre Dame,
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We've got some real challenges ahead. Obviously they start with Notre Dame.
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It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
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We really want to get rid of the stereotypes between the Notre Dame women and the Saint Mary's women. I haven't experienced [the tension] myself but some girls said they did, especially at Domerfest.
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My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
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When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?
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