"The Dud Avocado"

I picked up Elaine Dundy's American in Paris story from the late 1950s mostly because the back of the book says that Groucho Marx enjoyed it a great deal.

The American in question is a young girl:

• I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I  want to meet all the other people.
• I want (my wits) to be so sharp that I'm always able to guess right. Not be right - that's much different - that means you're going to do something about it.
• For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was this giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze. It contained everything I've ever wanted that money can buy. It was an enormous Christmas present wrapped in silver and blue tissue paper tied with satin ribbons and bells. Inside would be something to adorn, to amuse, and to dazzle me forever. It was my present for being alive.
  
• That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion..: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.
• How can Life be so contrary to - never mind Art - just to general information and what's called Common Knowledge?
  
• I wonder what there is about deception, I suppose I mean discretion (do I?), when it gets organized to the hilt like that, that always makes me laugh?
• I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live - exist or whatever - in the sense that other people do.
• I had always assumed that a certain sense of _identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others, I now saw this assumption was false.
• I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.
  
• "(Thank you) for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it."
• I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century.