Home > Author > Booth Tarkington
41 " 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
42 " 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
43 " Thus began the Great Tar Fight... "
― Booth Tarkington
44 " In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones- they had time for everything: time to think, time to talk, time to read,time to wait for a lady! "
45 " Got 'ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother know you're out? "
46 " Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their "
47 " You see?" she said. "I've been leading you without you knowing it. Of course that's because you're new to the town, and you give yourself up to the guidance of an old citizen.""I'm not so sure, Miss Adams. It might mean that I don't care where I follow so long as I follow you. "
― Booth Tarkington , Alice Adams
48 " My wife says Ambersons don’t make lettuce salad the way other people do; they don’t chop it up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar, and they have it separate—not along with the rest of the meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she’s going to buy some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like ‘em, she says. "
49 " I agree with my Uncle Sydney, as I once heard him say 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. "
50 " My theory of literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness—writes about people you could introduce into your own home. I agree with my Uncle Sydney, as I once heard him say 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, as you know from my telling you my theory of life. "
51 " gewgaws "
52 " A boy will nearly always run after anything that is running, and his first impulse is to throw a stone at it. This is a survival of primeval man, who must take every chance to get his dinner. So, when Penrod and Sam drove the hapless Whitey up the alley, they were really responding to an impulse thousands and thousands of years old—an impulse founded upon the primordial observation that whatever runs is likely to prove edible. Penrod and Sam were not "bad"; they were never that. They were something that was not their fault; they were historic. "
― Booth Tarkington , Penrod and Sam
53 " There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. "
― Booth Tarkington , The Gentleman from Indiana
54 " It was long ago in the days when men sighed when they fell in love; when people danced by candle and lamp, and did dance, too, instead of solemnly gliding about; in that mellow time so long ago, when the young were romantic and summer was roses and wine, old Carewe brought his lovely daughter home from the convent to wreck the hearts of the youth of Rouen. "
― Booth Tarkington , The Two Vanrevels
55 " In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with blessing upon blessing. "
56 " The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch. "
― Booth Tarkington , Beasley's Christmas Party
57 " People who have repeated a slander either get ashamed or forget it if they're let alone. Challenge them, and in self-defense they believe everything they've said; they'd rather believe you a sinner than believe themselves liars, naturally. Submit to gossip and you kill it, fight it, and you make it strong. People will forget almost any slander except the one that's been fought. "
― Booth Tarkington ,
58 " The only criticism any one has any business making against Congress is that it’s too good for some of the men we send there. Congress is our great virtue, understand; the congressmen are our fault. "
59 " brobdingnagian "
― Booth Tarkington , The Turmoil (The Growth Trilogy, #1)
60 " Age, confused by its own long accumulation of follies, is everlastingly inquiring, “What does she see in him?” as if young love came about through thinking—or through conduct. "
