Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

In every race after that, I finished in the top three. All through 1917 I raked in prize money with my clawed feet.

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.

I stood looking at the men—more my men now than ever before. Their lives, if they escaped with them, would be divided forever into Before the War, the War, and After, and between those divisions would stretch psychic no-man's-lands as desolate as any in France.

Those Yanks coming to help are going to need things," he said. "Their General Pershing asked for two thousand homers, to be used as messengers in the army. England has offered to send five hundred directly. And not just five hundred but the five hundred best. Many of you are among the best, true and tested. So there's no way around it. You're off to help our boys.

we'd been uptown at the Museum of Natural History at the time, safe beneath the blue whale hanging by its dorsal fin, unarmed and pacific, silent as ever, a sentinel in the lurid tabloid nightmare this city's been dreaming.

While our fellow pigeons did not regard bonds between hens as unnatural, the humans who kept us certainly seemed to—and in any case such a pairing could serve no human purpose, as it would yield no champion racers, no progeny at all. While I preferred to think of us as the humans' partners and collaborators—and we were; I wasn't wrong—we were also their property and their tools. What did I expect?

I felt sure that I was approaching the brink of my destiny. I wasn't mistaken. How was I to know that I'd never see John—or Big Tom, or Lady Jane, or Miss America, or any of the rest—ever again?

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, "I wouldn't count on it.

Olive, with her prim posture, her ungainly manner, and her reliance on elaborate fashions inappropriate for the office, strongly resembled a fancy pigeon: a creature bred out of its dignity across many generations.

drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted.

My father goaded me over my disinterest, not quite calling me a coward yet wondering, "What are you afraid of, son?" He didn't expect me to be a hunter but wanted me to hold a weapon in my hands without flinching. Silent of mouth, I would reply in my mind, This device is made to kill at worst, to maim at best. But I made myself say, "Nothing, Father. I'm not afraid." So I learned to shoot.

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

Laconic" and "sarcastic," as the men in my regiment would later invariably describe me. Classic New England.

I responded with what seemed an appropriate blend of honey and vinegar, suggesting that wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well. Artie beamed; if it was a test, I had passed.

I compensated for my athletic deficiency with an upright bearing and an impeccable style of dress that earned me the nickname "the Count"—one bestowed with affection, as I was good-humored about my own foibles.

The intricacies of contracts and the evolving stringency of the rules governing banks absorbed and grounded me, even as my entanglements with men—queer men, as Felix taught me to say—gave my body and heart the occasional flight.

Remarkable," he'd called my poems at our first meeting. "So urban and breezy. So droll and cosmopolitan. It's rare to find such profusion of wit in a woman.

I ceased to find the prospect of becoming a manful-man repugnant. When manifested in football and fraternity pranks, this roughhousing seemed stupid and shallow, but now that it was for ideals that I could admire, I saw the appeal.

Well, too bad, Diogenes: I make no apologies for a life that privileged pleasure, poise, and politesse. Had your lantern light fallen on my face that bright March morning I could have told you, honestly, that I have never been dishonest.

What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain. I

A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly.