{
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  "text": "\"What would you do if you were me?\" Cobbler pondered for a moment. \"Well,\" he said, \"I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over.\"",
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    "title": "The Salterton Trilogy",
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      "text": "People who talk a lot about their troubles never commit suicide; talk's the greatest safety-valve there is. I always laugh at that bit in Hamlet where he pretends to despise himself because he unpacks his heart with words, and falls a-scolding like a very drab; that's why the soliloquy about suicide is just Hamlet putting on intellectual airs. A chatterbox like that would never pop himself off with a bare bodkin. No, the suicides are the quiet ones, who can't find the words to fit their misery.",
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      "slug": "pretence-is-wonderfully",
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      "text": "Pretence is wonderfully stimulating to the artistic mind, which is why some people lie for fun, rather than from necessity.",
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Salterton_Trilogy#A_Mixture_of_Frailties",
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      "text": "But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory - humorous, poignant, humane allegory - disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.",
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