Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot.

I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less than human.

When I have all of Manhattan to choose from I tend to dither, to hold out for perfection—but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

I had a spot on one of the open lower decks, jammed with men, but my height granted me a view of the Statue of Liberty receding in the golden light, a sentimental sight that nevertheless provoked my sentiments. How many crimes, I wonder now—how many blunders worse than crimes—get committed in her name?

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I'd made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.

It makes me happy, and also sad, to think that this is where playful language is cherished now, and where the verbosity that I and my clever friends prized in our youth has gone to reside: the slums. Words don't cost a penny; during the Depression, they were all many of us had. I used them to make a fortune.

Extending hospitality to all, even to the most cloddish, truly is the basis of civilization. The fact that the most cloddish, having nothing better to do, always show up and spoil the party for everyone else probably spells civilization's ultimate doom.

Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize. Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.

If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun

The way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline. He'd been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy's, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

All right, all right, he said, with that gesture I'd come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts.

Maybe there's a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I'm missing.

Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

It troubles me that among my few remaining acquaintances there is no one with whom I can share my enthusiasm for these new things.

By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.

I spent my first Christmas in the city alone. Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

I was happy to see Bennie's liquor, if a bit disenchanted by its packaging. The prescription trick worked, but it always struck me as smug, inelegant, the wrong kind of clever. Most of us preferred to get our booze from honest crooks, who tended to be nicer and more interesting. It's hard to deny that a willingness to risk prison imparts a certain magnetism in social settings.

Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility.

Can I let you in on a remarkable secret? I find that the more ideas I let myself have, the more ideas I have.

I knew I could count on President Wilson to refrain from pious claptrap. "Human beings," he said, millet crunching in his beak, "seem powerfully invested in the notion that suffering improves or ennobles the sufferer. This is, of course, childish nonsense.

Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

I died when I was little more than two years old, on June 13, 1919, there in the Signal Corps lofts at Camp Vail, New Jersey. One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith "politeness." That's part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity—one's own and others'—but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.