Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.'
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Sometimes when I look at all my children, I say to myself, Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.
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To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'
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Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
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Sure i'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself some day.
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Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
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Don't reserve your best behavior for special occasions. You can't have two sets of manners, two social codes - one for those you admire and want to impress, another for those whom you consider unimportant. You must be the same to all people.
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Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.
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We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
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It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.
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You lose your manners when you're poor.
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Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
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Always have some project under way . . . an ongoing project that goes over from day to day and thus makes each day a smaller unit of time.
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Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
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Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.
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It it not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
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Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.
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The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.
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There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.
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Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women
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... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it
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When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.
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Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
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Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
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I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
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A lady is one who never shows her underwear unintentionally.
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I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
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I don't think about risks much. I just do what I want to do. If you gotta go, you gotta go.
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