Quotes from Louis Auchincloss

Snobbishness is a cancer in America because we pretend it's not there and let it grow until it's inoperable. In England it's less dangerous because it's out in the open.

You've got to let the boys be animals once in a while," he answered my protest as we walked away. "Social life was more attractive when gentlemen defended their honor with swords and not with lawsuits.

Which raised the question of whether she had ever loved, or even if she could love. And yet maybe what she felt was what everybody felt; maybe it was only the poets and romantics who had blown it up beyond recognition. Surely

What I really resent is that my graduates are not more different from his. For all my emphasis on the humanities and his on God, we both turn out stockbrokers!

There's no point discussing an engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life.

Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married.

The whole thing is so degrading! That a man like Eric should be reduced to crawling before those bloodsuckers who are taking every advantage of his weakened state. And strip himself of one whole third of his wealth to throw it away like all the huge sums they've already got out of him!

Polly's embarrassment revealed her regret that she should have given in to the age-old temptation of saying something disagreeable even to her oldest and most useful friend. But she had committed herself now. "I relate it," she replied in a bolder tone, "to my apprehension that you are using your perfectly proper wish to do great and noble things with Eric's money to disguise your equally natural desire to keep it out of the greedy hands of his family.

Communication is everything to you artists. You can't look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art.

But I'm afraid you've blotted your copybook fatally with Clara.

No! It's not your fault. You belong to the last generation of women who have been brought up to use their sex appeal to further their ambition.

And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She

Let me not be proud at petty victories, and let me remember that if I should ever become respected by the boys, it will be my task to be merciful and gentle and kind. I am here, after all, to serve them.

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

The older I get the more I realize that the only thing a teacher has to go on is that rare spark in a boy's eye. And when you see that, Brian, you're an ass if you worry where it comes from. Whether it's an ode of Horace or an Icelandic saga or something that goes bang in a laboratory.

Why should I reward his dirty tricks with my lily-white hand?

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed.

Well, be proud of it, then! And remember the James family in the Civil War. William and Henry ducked the draft and became famous writers, while their two fighting brothers were badly wounded and led wretched postwar lives!

Love was like the heaven the church in the old days had offered to the poor to keep them from rioting.

a lifetime's education was not the equivalent of a minute of Armageddon.

VIOLET LONGCOPE had, from the earliest signs of her daughter's incipient beauty, drilled into Clarabel's lovely head the warning that a single unwary submission of the heart to the wrong male charm could throw a girl perhaps irretrievably off the smooth tracks of the best laid life plan. The