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"Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort."
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"No matter. I was single, no children, a handful of plants and at 39, young enough to regroup. If I hit ground before I finished building my wings, I would not take anyone with me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is still better than University. In school, your teacher is the fruit picker and you are the open fruit basket. Then you take those fruits and make cakes and pies. But life is going to give you the chance to go out there and pick those fruits yourself. Then you can eat them, or make them into something else; any which way, your own hands picked them!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"If the sun needed friends to shine, it would not rule the sky alone."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Stop looking outside or at others for that which you seek of yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don't see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When you truly give up trying to be whole through others, you end up receiving what you always wanted from others."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The gods help them that help themselves."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power
"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
Humor
"Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried."
Feminism
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation
"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
Perception
"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
Fiction
"Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home."
Perspective
"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
Reading
"The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time."
Humor
"No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog."
Humor
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