Quotes from Margaret Halsey

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.

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.

Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.

Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

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

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to see 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.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

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

An overripe banana, yellow outside, squishy in

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

Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.