"The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn’t made every line funny. It’s so depressing."

Quentin Crisp Literature See all quotes by Quentin Crisp →

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“I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.”

“To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

“Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.”

“I never saw Portsmouth by day.”

“If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”

“I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.”

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"o much of the tensions between police departments and minority communities that they serve is because we ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves. As a society, we choose to un…"

— Barack Obama

Politics1961

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"Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to h…"

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