Quotes from Booth Tarkington

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.

The understanding smile of an old wife to her husband is one of the loveliest things in the world.

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.

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

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!

Christmas day is the children's, but the holidays are youth's dancing-time.

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.

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.

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.

Not quite so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving, grimy city . . . there was time to live.

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.

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

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?

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.

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.

Thus began the Great Tar Fight...

Got 'ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother know you're out?

how much a thing means to one man and how little it means to another ain't the right way to look at a business matter.

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

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.

when Alice came home from wherever other girls or women had been gathered, she always hurried to her mother with earnest descriptions of the clothing she had seen. At such times, if Adams was present, he might recognize "organdie," or "taffeta," or "chiffon," as words defining certain textiles, but the rest was too technical for him, and he was like a dismal boy at a sermon, just waiting for it to get itself finished.