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"Even his own speeches bored him."
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"I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings."

"My eyes are open and I'm not seeing a thing because I am so lost inside."

"All the things that people do in order to show that they don't need anybody... meanwhile, all they really want to do is say, "Please keep me." We all want to be kept. The problem is we are too afraid to let anyone know about it. What are these fragile things in our hearts that have so much fear of being broken?"

"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."

"Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong."

"There's still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then."

"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me."
Explore more quotes by Barbara Tuchman

"To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost."

"The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion."

"Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism."

"Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls."

"How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII."

"I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended."

"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
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