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"The fact is that I loved being in England."
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"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."
"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."
"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."
"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
Explore more quotes by Martin C. Smith
"I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer."
"If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south."
"Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right."
"Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man."
"There is a huge antipathy in England between the north and the south, the working class and the owning class."
"I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about."
"The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia."
"But at the same time I went down into the mines with working miners who are still young men, younger than I am, who are aware that their working life is coming to an end and they feel suddenly cut off."
"Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class."
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