"Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it."
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Literature quotes
Literature
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Literature quotes (page 62 of 201)
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"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
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"Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation."
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"Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?"
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"Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin."
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"I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual."
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"The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it."
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"Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable."
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"England has always been disinclined to accept human nature."
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"Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed."
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"We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next."
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"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
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"God doesn't know things. He is things."
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"One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes."
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"Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad."
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"The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more."
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"The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living."
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"I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery."
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"That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people."
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"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
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