Quotes from Janet Flanner

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.

She was built for crowds. She has never come any closer to life than the dinner table.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.