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1 " She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality. "
― Mary McCarthy , The Oasis
2 " His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground. "
3 " He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm. "
4 " the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief.” And "
5 " The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst. "
6 " They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves. "
7 " boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective. "
8 " independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience. "
9 " Not knaves, fools. "
10 " something had been lost that was perhaps an essential ingredient - a man can live without self-respect, but a group shatters, dispersed by the ugliness it sees reflected in itself. "
