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Peg Bracken
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“What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us.”
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“The fact is, the cocktail party has much in its favor. Going to one is a good way of indicating that you're still alive and about, if such is the case, and that you're glad other people are, without having to spend an entire evening proving it.”
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“... everything from television to fashion ads has made it seem wicked to cast a shadow. This wild emaciated look appeals to some women, though not to many men, who are seldom seen pinning up a Vogue illustration in a machine shop.”
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“Molded salads are best served in situations where they have little or no competition ... Like television, gelatin is too often a vehicle for limp leftovers that couldn't make it anywhere else.”
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“... many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available. And once they've chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.”
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“Many a restaurant seems to employ more copy writers than cooks.”
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“It is a rare expert who clearly realizes how inexpert someone else can be.”
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“I believe that one's basic financial attitudes are — like a tendency toward fat knees — probably formed in utero, or, at the very latest, in cribbo.”
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“... quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal.”
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“Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?”
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“... she was constitutionally unable to believe that all other writers didn't have it easy. For it was obvious that their words were hummingbirds, a bright whir of them over the typewriter, seeking only a landing strip. She alone stared at the white paper.”
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“People would have more leisure time if it weren't for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.”
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“... one's travel life is basically as incommunicable as his sex life is ... ”
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“... travel never made a bore interesting; it only makes for a well-traveled bore, in the same way coffee makes for a wide-awake drunk. In fact, the more a bore travels, the worse he gets. The only advantage in it for his friends and family is that he isn't home as much.”
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“... a celebrity is someone who no longer does the things that made him a celebrity.”
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“'It's like anything else,' Mrs. Moone said, largely. She said it quite often, I noticed, one of those fat, loose remarks that seem to settle down over everything, like a collapsing tent.”
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“It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English ... ”
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“Like a chastity belt, the package tour keeps you out of mischief but a bit restive for wondering what you missed.”
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“One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.”
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“Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you.”
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“The same fire that hardens the egg will melt the butter; and much depends on the personality type, whether you customarily rise to a challenge or whether you sink. For as long as I can remember, I have been a sinker. One challenge, and I drop like a rock.”
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“But let me say this about learning experiences: they're weird. Or put it this way: what you learn from a learning experience is generally something else.”
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“Peas went with carrots as infallibly as ham went with eggs. For years I thought carrots and peas grew on the same vine.”
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“Mothers always think you are working either too hard or not hard enough.”
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“Kitchens were different then, too — not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing.”
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“You may have noticed, as I have, that if ever you find yourself declaring emphatically and unequivocally that you will never do some one particular thing, chances are good that this is precisely what you will one day find yourself doing.”
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“There was something immensely comforting, I found, about a crumpet — so comforting that I've never forgotten about them and have even learned to make them myself against those times when I have no other source of supply.”
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“This is your dividing line, by the way, between child and nonchild — when the first trouble happens that Mama can't fix.”
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“As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold.”
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“... the McKinleyville First Presbyterian had turned into a mortuary, and my first thought was, How could they tell?”
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“I recently adopted for my own a good motto I saw somewhere, on a barroom mirror or possibly a washroom wall: 'The time you enjoyed wasting wasn't wasted.' I think I'll have that printed some day on a T-shirt or the bedroom ceiling.”
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“... the most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.”
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“ ... there is hardly a problem, no matter how complicated it is, that when looked at in the right way doesn't become still more complicated.”
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“... it isn't true, by the way, that nothing is as bad as you think it's going to be. Some things are exactly as bad as you thought they were going to be, and some things are worse.”
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“... parents embarrass their children probably more than the other way around. I don't know why we should blush so hard for our parents — we didn't rear them — and yet we do.”
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“... I've never found anything whatsoever that is as easy to do the right way as the wrong way, and if there is such a thing I would like to know about it.”
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“When you're little, time stretches obligingly, and vacation is forever.”
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“A fellow had to chase you till you caught him. Everyone knew that.”
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“... forgetting things is what gives old age a bad name, that and old age.”
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“People will admit to arson and mayhem sooner than no sense of humor.”
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“... you're not supposed to cuss when you're an old lady, and just when there's so much more to cuss about ... ”
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“I didn't learn for years that you generally find your Self after you quit looking for it.”
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“It is important to remember that these are your Declining Years, in which you can jolly well decline to do what you don't feel like doing, unless not doing it would make you feel worse than doing it.”
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“Everything takes longer than you think it should, except for some things that don't take as long.”
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“On their return from a trip, it is wise to see friends promptly, before they've had time to get their pictures developed.”
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“'Let's eat out.' Those are the three little words every woman wants to hear ...”
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“Self-pity is the simplest luxury.”
Peg Bracken, U.S. writer, humorist
(1918 - 2007)
Full name: Ruth Eleanor Bracken