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Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp Quotes

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Famous Quentin Crisp Quotes

“When I was young, I don't know how, I spent all my time in the presence of married women telling me their troubles. And when I said 'Why did you marry?' they said, 'Oh I married to get away from home.' And when I said, 'And why don't you leave him?' they gave the saddest answer in the world: they said, 'Where would I go?' So they stayed with men they didn't like because they had nowhere to go.”

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“Now you can leave home at any time you like.Your mother comes down and finds a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her plate. And she says, 'Oh! Rosemary's gone to Paris. No wonder the bathroom was so tidy.' And nobody minds. But in my day, to go abroad with all those wicked Frenchmen, what would become of them? So no-one ever went anywhere.”

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“I've come from a very masculine country to a feminine country. England was very masculine; people went from England to abroad, and they landed from above and they said "These are the gods you will worship, these are the crops you will grow, now go away and do it." Which is a manly attitude. Americans go abroad and they say, "Try not to quarrel so much", which is a feminine attitude.”

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“Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.”

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“The United States are a miracle: the division between two states is sometimes a river or a mountain, and sometimes it's a straight line. But nobody says, "That tree really belongs in South Carolina. I shan't do anything about it now, I'll get it back later." I shall go after I am here to London and after that to Potsdam, where Comrade Stalin, Mr Churchill and Harry Truman divided up Europe; and what we see now is the result of that. The Americans would have accepted it. But Europeans don't accept anything.”

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“People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.”

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