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Decade After Decade, Artists Came To Paint The Light Of Provincetown, And Comparisons Were Made To The Lagoons Of Venice And The Marshes Of Holland, But Then The Summer Ended And Most Of The Painters Left, And The Long Dingy Undergarment Of The Gray New England Winter, Gray As The Spirit Of My Mood, Came Down To Visit.

-Norman Mailer

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Decade After Decade, Artists

Norman Mailer

...

Decade After Decade, Artists Came To Paint The Light Of Provincetown, And Comparisons Were Made To The Lagoons Of Venice And The Marshes Of Holland, But Then The Summer Ended And Most Of The Painters Left, And The Long Dingy Undergarment Of The Gray New England Winter, Gray As The Spirit Of My Mood, Came Down To Visit.

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There Are Four Stages To Marriage. First There's The Affair, Then There's The Marriage, Then Children, And Finally The Fourth Stage, Without Which You Cannot Know A Woman, The Divorce.

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Goldstein, You'd Be A Pretty Good Boy If You Wasn't So Chicken.

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At Bottom, I Mean Profoundly At Bottom, The Fbi Has Nothing To Do With Communism, It Has Nothing To Do With Catching Criminals, It Has Nothing To Do With The Mafia, The Syndicate, It Has Nothing To Do With Trust-busting, It Has Nothing To Do With Interstate Commerce, It Has Nothing To Do With Anything But Serving As A Church For The Mediocre. A High Church For The True Mediocre.

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Love Asks Us That We Be A Little Braver Than Is Comfortable, A Little More Generous, A Little More Flexible. It Means Living On The Edge More Than We Care To.

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Existentialism Is The Kind Of Philosophy That Makes For Legendary Children.

One Of The Reasons The English Got Through All Their Falls And The Loss Of Their Empire, All Their Disasters, Their Strikes, Their Difficulties, Their Wars Through The Years Was They Had Shakespeare To Fall Back On. And They Speak Well In England.

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If A Person Is Not Talented Enough To Be A Novelist, Not Smart Enough To Be A Lawyer, And His Hands Are Too Shaky To Perform Operations, He Becomes A Journalist.

Great Hope Has No Real Footing Unless One Is Willing To Face Into The Doom That May Also Be On The Way. P.207

Comfortless Was My Religion, Anxiety Of The Anxieties, For I Believed God Was Not Love, But Courage. Love Came Only As A Reward.

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Harsh Words Live In The Dungeon Of The Heart

Obsession Is The Single Most Wasteful Human Activity, Because With An Obsession You Keep Coming Back And Back And Back To The Same Question And Never Get An Answer.

People Who Are Greedy Have Extraordinary Capacities For Waste-they Must, They Take In Too Much.

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There Is No Greater Impotence In All The World Like Knowing You Are Right And That The Wave Of The World Is Wrong, Yet The Wave Crashes Upon You.

You Can't Be A Serious Writer Of Fiction Unless You Believe The Story You Are Telling.

Murder Offers The Promise Of Vast Relief. It Is Never Unsexual.

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Television Is Coitus Interruptus Brought Into Aesthetics.

America Has An Almost Obscene Infatuation With Itself. Has There Ever Been A Big, Powerful Country That Is As Patriotic As America? And Patriotic In The Tinniest Way, With So Much Flag Waving? You'd Really Think We Were Some Poor Little Republic, And That If One Person Lost His Religion For One Hour, The Whole Thing Would Crumble. America Is The Real Religion In This Country.

Great Sex Is Apocalyptic. There Is No Such Thing As Great Sex Unless You Have An Apocalyptic Moment.

The Fact That We've Been A Great Democracy Doesn't Mean We Will Automatically Keep Being One If We Keep Waving The Flag.

No Heart Is So Hard As The Timid Heart.

People Who Live Under Fascism Are Not Only Miserable But They're Full Of Shame. You Just Don't Go In And Inject Democracy Into Them. They're Half Crazy With Their Own.

A Democracy Depends Upon People Getting Brighter All The Time. Democracies Are Delicate. They're Not Just Ipso Facto And Just Go On And On.

Love Was Love, One Could Find It With Anyone, One Could Find It Anywhere. It Was Just That You Could Never Keep It. Not Unless You Were Ready To Die For It.

You're Gambling With Something Vital. Most Writers Get Smashed Egos.

For 40 Years We Were Led To Think Of The Russians As Godless, Materialistic And An Evil Empire. When The Cold War Ended, We Suddenly Discovered That Russia Was A Poor Third World Country. They Had Not Been Equipped To Take Over The World. In Fact, They Were Just Trying To Improve A Miserable Standard Of Oppressive Living, And Couldn't. They Had To Spend Too Much On Arms Build-up. We Didn't Win The Cold War; We Bankrupted The Russians. In Effect, It Was A Big Bank Exhausting The Reserves Of A Smaller One.

Fascism Is More Of A Natural State Than Democracy. To Assume Blithely That We Can Export Democracy Into Any Country We Choose Can Serve Paradoxically To Encourage More Fascism At Home And Abroad. Democracy Is A State Of Grace That Is Attained Only By Those Countries Who Have A Host Of Individuals Not Only Ready To Enjoy Freedom But To Undergo The Heavy Labor Of Maintaining It.

The Essence Of Spirit ... Was To Choose The Thing Which Did Not Better One's Position But Made It More Perilous. That Was Why The World He Knew Was Poor, For It Insisted Morality And Caution Were Identical.

America Is A Hurricane, And The Only People Who Do Not Hear The Sound Are Those Fortunate If Incredibly Stupid And Smug White Protestants Who Live In The Center, In The Serene Eye Of The Big Wind.

The Function Of Socialism Is To Raise Suffering To A Higher Level.

The Private Terror Of The Liberal Spirit Is Invariably Suicide, Not Murder.

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America Ferrera

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