the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

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Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

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Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

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Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

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Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.

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He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

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So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

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They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

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Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

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You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

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