Lillian Hellman Quotes
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Styles in wit change so.
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I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.
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God forgives those who invent what they need.
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What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
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Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation
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If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
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Writers talk too much.
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Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.
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The happy problem of our time - longer life.
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I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
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We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.
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I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.
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Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
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It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
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Fashions in sin change.
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Everybody's got a habit.
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Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.
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Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.
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People change and forget to tell each other.
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The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.
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Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.
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Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
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We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth.
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The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
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A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.
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You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.
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some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.
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For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
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My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.
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