Top 37 Booth Tarkington Quotes
#1. Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.
Booth Tarkington
#2. Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either.
Booth Tarkington
#3. Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.
Booth Tarkington
#4. It was annoying how her voice, though never loud, pursued him. No matter how vociferous were other voices, all about, he seemed unable to prevent himself from constantly recognizing hers.
Booth Tarkington
#5. 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
Booth Tarkington
#6. Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.
Booth Tarkington
#7. Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain.
Booth Tarkington
#8. He had not yet learned that the only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires.
Booth Tarkington
#9. 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
#10. Christmas day is the children's, but the holidays are youth's dancing-time.
Booth Tarkington
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.
Booth Tarkington
#19. 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
#22. The understanding smile of an old wife to her husband is one of the loveliest things in the world.
Booth Tarkington
#23. I suppose about the only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.
Booth Tarkington
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Not quite so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving, grimy city . . . there was time to live.
Booth Tarkington
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. They were upon their great theme: "When I get to be a man!" Being human, though boys, they considered their present estate too commonplace to be dwelt upon. So, when the old men gather, they say: "When I was a boy!" It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover.
Booth Tarkington
#34. This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.
Booth Tarkington
#35. 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
#37. 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
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