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Mavis Gallant
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“Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.”
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“Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.”
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“Now that he was rich he was not thought ignorant any more, but simply eccentric.”
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“... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.”
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“She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.”
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“The vocation exists, and so does the gift; but vocation and gift are seldom of equal proportions, and I suppose that the struggle to equate them is the true and secret tension.”
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“I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe — something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing — how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?”
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“There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.”
Mavis Gallant, Canadian writer
(1922)
Full name: Mavis Leslie Young Gallant.