There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
AGNES REPPLIERNo rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
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In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
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There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
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if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
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It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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Necessity knows no Sunday.
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Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
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Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.
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Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
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The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.
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Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
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There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
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If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
AGNES REPPLIER