Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

A motto of mine had long been, "When the heart isn't in it, all zest in the job is destroyed

But not a day has slipped by these past hundred years that I haven't recollected my final flight. And now, on the eve of their centenary, here in the darkened museum—Sergeant Stubby asleep beside me, climate-controlled air sighing around us—those events replay behind these glass eyes that I can never close.

committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.

Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I'll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole.

But the other thing I felt—that no one had ever told me I might—was that as much as I loved him, I could never be totally sure that I wanted him around forever. I did not know if my life was categorically "better" for having him here.

Nostalgia for what's new: The French probably have a word for that.

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.

I do wear underwear under them. I am a lady, after all; plus I don't want a yeast infection, and who cares if I have a visible panty line?

Among many other things, the Depression changed how I felt about crowds: 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.

This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objective. 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.

My older brother never came to visit me. He did write me letters, though: distant and condescending ones, because those were the shallow pools in which his small mind swam.

I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what's new and exciting than any number of hours of television can. As ever, the street is the source of the latest things humans have invented—culturally speaking, at least. The last new things, maybe, that humans will ever invent.

In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn't that what we always mean by in my youth?

I am old and all I have left is time. I don't mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think.

No one survives the future

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

Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, "I wouldn't count on it.

Five years later those fellows were all gone, their capital vanished like so much cigar smoke, while I churned out the only commodities that still held their value: courage, poise, humor, and hope.

Whenever they occupied Belgian or French territory, the Germans would order all pigeons in the region destroyed.

wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well.

I am proud that I fought so hard against the world, relieved that I made my fragile truce with it. I can greet it now, from time to time, as it really is.

Unlike some species—crows, cowbirds, cuckoos—pigeons are not vengeful. But some part of me was eager to take to the air on behalf of these slaughtered birds, if not to avenge their deaths then to fly for the side that hadn't committed such an atrocity.

But people have come to make a hobby of detesting the birds, I think, because they've come to see that pigeons are much like people: dirty and murmuring, greedy and abundant, flocking in a corpus of such shit and weight that one fears they may permanently deface or crush whatever they congregate on.

When he was still in here with me, my pigeon buddy President Wilson would rag me, joking but jealous, about all the ink committed to Whit and me in newsprint, magazines, the pages of books. But so much of it was wrong, and so much of it was terrible.