Margaret Halsey
Margaret Halsey
Margaret Halseywas an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Towards Somegrew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies. It won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
american-author begin defects engaging gradually length rather seem staring time whenever
Humility is not my forte, and 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.
cough died fatal gone good indignant instrument last lightning minutes seven wings
I doused the fatal instrument with lightning promptitude, but it was a good seven minutes before the last indignant handkerchief had folded its wings and gone back to its reticule and the last manufactured cough died protestingly away.
competition quality clock
the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.
hands giving disease
prejudice will always exist. So will sickness and disease, but that scarcely seems sufficient reason for telling our medical scientists to put on their hats, close up their laboratories, and give the spirochetes, bacilli and viruses a free hand.
kindness roles actors
the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
humorous twenties four
Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.
long people prejudice
The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.
emotional people atmosphere
The people who are unprejudiced, but who ... feel it is so hopeless there is no use trying ... probably do just as much damage to the emotional atmosphere in which we are facing the problem as the fanatical Negrophobes.
long wonder surprise
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.
patterns liquor employed
Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns ...
insulting dinner faces
The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
drinking flocks spokes
when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
democracy demand suspension
Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.
fire hot nerves
I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.