Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

I do not eschew the shoulder pads and jewel tones I see on the mannequins, silly though they may be. Everything in fashion these days seems so childlike and bellicose, bright yet aggressive, a cute positivity that recasts every woman as a cross between a majorette and a Sherman tank.

I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.

courtliness being the gear that his engine idled in.

We've been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I

for the same reason I think people enjoy watching sports: seeing someone in full command of what he is expected to do, doing it better than most would, and doing so with joy. My

You're different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they're invisible to us. They're natural, like breathing. But they're visible to you.

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention

This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objectives. If one knocks oneself out of one's routine- and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs- then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is

New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

When they sent us home from the hospital with him, it felt like we were actors, the leads in a heist film. Like we couldn't be getting away with such outrageous treasure.

Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend.

When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.

Olive was in the habit of saying "honestly" so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful. I marveled at her mother's prescience in having named her daughter after a green—with envy—cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.

The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom.

The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom. When they point from the other side of the glass, Freedom isn't free, I hear the patriots say. Blah, blah, blah. They're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. The Great War cost me a lot, and although it's not a competition, on this, the eve of my centenary, I can honestly conclude that it cost Whit more.

Maybe I'll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That

thrilled to the familiar happiness of being high up and homing. The voice said, as it did every time, Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Wright Farm! For a moment I was flummoxed by the alien topography of the Scottish Highlands, utterly different from the gentle hills of Chipping Norton. And then I knew where I was.

To call the shipboard food terrible was to overpraise it. Our meals were prepared by English cooks, evidently committed to safeguarding their reputation for awfulness. Boiled potatoes, rice, tapioca, and marmalade—no salt, no sugar, no seasoning of any kind. For lunch that day, we'd had rabbit stew, which tasted as if the cooks had left the fur on. Coffee was served from garbage cans.

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within

Smoking helped me think and calmed my nerves, which I had in excess.