Booth Tarkington > Quotes

“Gossip is never fatal until it is denied.”
― Booth Tarkington

“Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either. ”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“...at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this; that's the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“It is love in old age, no longer blind, that is true love. For the love's highest intensity doesn't necessarily mean it's highest quality.”
― Booth Tarkington

“My theory on literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness-writes about people you could introduce into your own home...he did not care to read a book or go to a play about people he would not care to meet at his own dinner table. I believe we should live by certain standards and ideals...”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“...I suppose about the only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones—another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure—they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady!”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying comparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Gentleman from Indiana

“I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid—they're like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You know how wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner—and then, in such a little while, it isn't there at all; nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“I always thought that explained it: the romance is a reaction from the algebra. I never knew a person connected with mathematics or astronomy or statistics, or any of those exact things, who didn't have a crazy streak in 'em SOMEwhere.”
― Booth Tarkington, Beasley's Christmas Party

“In all my life, the most arrogant people that I've known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people's opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can't stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Nothing stays or holds or keeps where there is growth, he somehow perceived vaguely but truly. Great Caesar dead and turned to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away. Dead Caesar was nothing but a tiresome bit of print in a book that schoolboys study for awhile and then forget. The Ambersons had passed, and the new people would pass, and the new people that came after them, and then the next new ones, and the next—and the next—”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Is this life?'Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. 'Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to?”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“It is the liveliest time in life, the happiest of the irresponsible times in life. Mothers echo its happiness—nothing is like a mother who has a son home from college, except another mother with a son home from college. Bloom does actually come upon these mothers; it is a visible thing; and they run like girls, walk like athletes, laugh like sycophants. Yet they give up their sons to the daughters of other mothers, and find it proud rapture enough to be allowed to sit and watch.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons [with Biographical Introduction]

“An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.”
― Booth Tarkington

“As with husbands and wives, so with many fathers and daughters, and so with some sons and mothers: the man will himself be cross in public and think nothing of it, nor will he greatly mind a little crossness on the part of the woman; but let her show agitation before any spectator, he is instantly reduced to a coward's slavery. Women understand that ancient weakness, of course; for it is one of their most important means of defense, but can be used ignobly.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations of every natural act.”
― Booth Tarkington, Penrod

“Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged lovers are a joke—not a very funny one.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons [with Biographical Introduction]

“So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard,'Engaged'. She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon tables marked 'Reserved": the glance, slightly discontented, passes on at once.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams