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Angela Thirkell
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“Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.”
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“If there is one pleasure on earth which surpasses all others, it is leaving a play before the end. I might perhaps except the joy of taking tickets for a play, dining well, sitting on after dinner, and finally not going at all. That, of course, is very heaven.”
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“... Milton cannot have been at all the sort of person one would want to know ... ”
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“Mrs. Morland very wittily defined an agent as someone whom you pay to make bad blood between yourself and your publisher.”
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“But human nature cannot be content on a diet of honey and if there is nothing in one's life that requires pity, one must invent it; for to go through life unpitied would be an unthinkable loss.”
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“ The organ pealed forth ... In every heart began to spring that exquisite hope, seldom if ever realized, that the bride will have had a fit, or eloped with someone else.”
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“'Indeed, indeed, the times are troubled, Sir Edmund,' he said, 'but we must remember that we are all in God's hands.' 'I know we are,' said Mrs. Brandon earnestly, laying her hand on the Vicar's sleeve, 'and that is just what is so perfectly dreadful.'”
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“First love is an astounding experience and if the object happens to be totally unworthy and the love not really love at all, it makes little difference to the intensity or the pain.”
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“Christmas, so long looming over everyone's head, finally surged up, buried everyone alive and ebbed away, leaving its victims distinctly cross.”
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“... it is rather depressing to think that one will still be oneself when one is dead, but I dare say one won't be so critical then.”
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“If only life were one long crisis, everyone would be perfect.”
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“Mrs. Belton was not one of those people who feel that to make a will means instant death to the testator. Wills to her were, on the whole, things that everyone made and in many cases (notably in that of Aunt Mary) altered at least once a year through a long and quarrelsome life.”
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“... their ill-concealed indifference to his travels and their interest in local affairs soon cured him of travellers' tales and he began to realize the deep truth that no one, broadly speaking, ever wishes to hear what you have been doing.”
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“... he didn't know exactly what he wanted to pray for; in which he was like most other people. For our real prayer, if we had the wits or the courage to formulate it, would be a general plea for everything to be all right for ever.”
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“Tom was feeling more and more like the Prodigal Son and did not like it, as indeed we daresay the Prodigal Son himself did not like it either. For to have to eat fatted calf when you are thoroughly ashamed of yourself and only want to slink in and not be noticed must be a severe trial; not to speak of one's Good Brother.”
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“If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.”
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“It has been noticed that people who are not parents often have a peculiar fondness for children. This is sometimes attributed to a very beautiful nostalgia for a gift denied to them — dream-children, flowers that have only bloomed in imagination — but we think it is rather because they have not the faintest idea how dreadful children are.”
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“Never economize on luxuries.”
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“The great thing in life is not to be able to do things, because then they are always done for you.”
Angela Thirkell, Australian writer
(1890 - 1961)
Full name: Angela Mackail Thirkell.