One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
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It's not a slam at you when people are rude-it's a slam at the people they've met before.
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There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.
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Advertising is a racket...its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
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Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
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There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
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Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
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It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
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The test of a first-fate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
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At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
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He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.
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Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
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Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
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At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
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I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
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The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
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In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
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Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
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What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
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Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.
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Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
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No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.
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Thirty-the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
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Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
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Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
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Strange is it not That of the myriads who before us pass'd the Door of darkness through, not one returns to tell us of the Road, which to discover, we must travel to.
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
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Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.
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