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Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s QUOTES

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s QUOTES

1 " To Mr. Blot, who went through life an unconscious example of the raison d'être of the British Empire, a shipwreck was merely one of the many things to be ignored. His was a calming influence. "

― Cornelia Otis Skinner , Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s

2 " For all that little financial lesson in the Montreal hotel, Emily was still confused by British currency. She’d grown highly incensed not only with it but with me because she couldn’t understand it. It was the only thing I ever heard her admit to not understanding. It was in vain that I tried to show her the difference between a half crown and a two-shilling piece. She refused to admit they were anything but two versions of fifty cents, and persisted in being so stubbornly obtuse about it that I finally told her that if she just bring herself to read what was written on them, she’d know. This didn’t work out so well either because she’d keep taxi drivers waiting interminably while she’d scan the reading matter of each and every coin, turning it round and round, sometimes breathing on it and rubbing it clear. When I suggested that people might think her awfully queer, she said, not at all, they’d merely mistake her for a coin collector.
I tried explaining to her that one florin meant two shillings but that only made her madder. The day we received a bill made out in guineas and I told her that there was no such thing as a guinea, it was a pound and one shilling, only the swanker shops charged you in guineas, and you paid in pound and shillings, but you called it guineas, although as I had said there really was no such thing, she slapped me. "

― Cornelia Otis Skinner , Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s

3 " My parents took us to dinner but we came back early. Tomorrow was to be a day of days and we must get a good night's rest. Nothing, Emily said, was a greater aid to beauty than a long slumber; the eyes were made clear and sparkling and the skin like tinted porcelain. "

― Cornelia Otis Skinner , Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s