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Isn't It Curious How Completely Ignorant We All Are Of The Most Important Part Of Our Bodily Mechanism. It Is Really Criminal. Yet There Is No Nation In The World That Doesnt Surround Sex With Fantastic Walls. Of Course Ours Are Sillier Than Any-but Not Much.

-John Dos Passos

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Isn't It Curious How

John Dos Passos

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Isn't It Curious How Completely Ignorant We All Are Of The Most Important Part Of Our Bodily Mechanism. It Is Really Criminal. Yet There Is No Nation In The World That Doesnt Surround Sex With Fantastic Walls. Of Course Ours Are Sillier Than Any-but Not Much.

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Letters Are Largely Written To Get Things Out Of Your System.

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A Curious Thing About Atrocity Stories Is That They Mirror, Instead Of The Events They Purport To Describe, The Extent Of The Hatred Of The People That Tell Them. Still, You Can't Listen Unmoved To Tales Of Misery And Murder.

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It's Easy To Forget How Central The French People Are In Everything We Mean When We Say Europe.

Women Hock Their Jewels And Their Husbands' Insurance Policies To Acquire An Unaccustomed Shade In Hair Or Crêpe De Chine. Why Then Is It That When Anyone Commits Anything Novel In The Arts He Should Be Always Greeted By This Same Peevish Howl Of Pain And Surprise? One Is Led To Suspect That The Interest People Show In These Much Talked Of Commodities, Painting, Music, And Writing, Cannot Be Very Deep Or Very Genuine When They So Wince Under An Unexpected Impact.

Breaking With Old Friends Is One Of The Most Painful Of The Changes In All That Piling Up Of A Multitude Of Small Distasteful Changes That Constitutes Growing Older.

If I Were Sufficiently Romantic I Suppose I'd Have Killed Myself Long Ago Just To Make People Talk About Me. I Haven't Even Got The Conviction To Make A Successful Drunkard.

I've Always Thought You Should Concentrate On Paddling Your Own Canoe.

Women Alone Always Order Sole. It Means Something.

To Fight Oppression, And To Work As Best We Can For A Sane Organization Of Society, We Do Not Have To Abandon The State Of Mind Offreedom. If We Do That We Are Letting The Same Thuggery In By The Back Door That We Are Fighting Off In Front Of The House.

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A Writer ... Whittles At The Words And Phrases Of Today And Makes Of Them Forms To Set The Mind Of Tomorrow's Generation.

A Set Of Ideas, A Point Of View, A Frame Of Reference Is In Space Only An Intersection, The State Of Affairs At Some Given Momentin The Consciousness Of One Man Or Many Men, But In Time It Has Evolving Form, Virtually Organic Extension. In Time Ideas Can Be Thought Of As Sprouting, Growing, Maturing, Bringing Forth Seed And Dying Like Plants.

Marxism Has Not Only Failed To Promote Human Freedom, It Has Failed To Produce Food.

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The Man Who Invented Eskimo Pie Made A Million Dollars, So One Is Told, But E.e. Cummings, Whose Verse Has Been Appearing Off Andon For Three Years Now, And Whose Experiments Should Not Be More Appalling To Those Interested In Poetry Than The Experiment Of Surrounding Ice-cream With A Layer Of Chocolate Was To Those Interested In Soda Fountains, Has Hardly Made A Dent In The Doughy Minds Of Our So-called Poetry Lovers.

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Curiosity Urges You On-driving Force.

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I Think The Satirist Is Always Basically Optimistic. The Satirist's Complaint About Society Is Always That It Doesn't Measure Up To A Fairly High Ideal He Has. I Think That Even The Bitterest Satirist, Even A Man Like Swift, Was Probably Rather An Optimist At Heart.

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Great Works Of The Imagination Are Not Produced Quickly Nor Do They Take Quick Effect On The Popular Mind.

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