Best 5 quotes of Helen Macinnes on MyQuotes

Americans by the very nature of the soft fat they collected around their brains along with all of their comforts, their total ignorance of historical meanings, their delusion that anarchists were either comic little men plotting nothings in a dark cellar or misunderstood cranks--how could Americans be taken seriously in a world of real politics?

For women, right from the day they went to their first party, always hoped too much: how many dances, seemingly successful, had been grim failures covered over with a smile; how many invitations accepted became invitations regretted; how many plans and dreams had become stupidities; how much pretence that all was well, when it wasn't? We are too personal, she thought, in the way we interpret a look, a tone of voice, a smile. How lucky to be a man and never pay attention to the little things; how fortunate to take people as they are, and not to suffer from taking them as you would like them to be. How terrible to be a woman, to feel the difference between the dream and the reality, and yet to keep dreaming in spite of reality.

I sometimes think that normal, everyday life is only a delusion. We walk on a think crust of earth which we call peace; and every now and again we can hear a rumble below our feet; and sometimes the crust splits and we see that, underneath there is a glowing inferno ready to erupt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it is always there.

Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? 'We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don't even notice the audience.

Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.