MARGARET HALSEY

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.

Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

The role of a do-gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and been used to all their lives—for judging their selves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.

In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.

I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.

Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.

children are an embarrassment to a business civilization. A business society needs children for the same reason that a nomadic or a pastoral society needs them - to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, however, children are of no use to a business society until they have almost reached physical maturity.

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means -- from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.

In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.

I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.

The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.