Anna Godbersen Quotes

It had been too much for Edith to take and she had gone to her room so that her nieces wouldn't see her cry anymore.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

I know that I might die but that seems a happier end than being without you and anyway it seems to me that looking in the face of hard things and still being able to move forward even when the end includes grave danger and the possibility of death is the mark of a man.

She felt so much aware of her own beauty it seemed inconceivable that everybody else wouldn't notice the difference too.

Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.

I am a good leader; I know how to explain men to themselves.

As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.

Maybe Leland would appear there by chance in the morning his chin freshly shaved against his stiff new collar and upon seeing his love in such duress would spring into action. Maybe he would even carry her out like a princess in a bedtime story.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams.
The girls of 1929.

Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.

The value of secrets is ever fluctuating although ladies who have been in society for a long time learn that a secret kept can be worth more than a secret told.

Even when a girl is married she still never completely leaves her mother and father's home.

Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.

After Henry's treatment of her she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

All really interesting girls invent themselves.

Before her angry impulses got the better of her, she admonished herself that she was born to win and that one did not win by throwing temper tantrums--at least not outside of one's own home, which could result in vicious, spurious rumors.

A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.

It was disgraceful but also romantic enough to make Lina's heart turn.

Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.

Diana knew it wouldn't be right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.

The headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes.

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself - for she had known what Henry's love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands.

The first stab of love is like a sunset, a blaze of color
oranges, pearly pinks, vibrant purples ...

She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.

The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.

Henry wondered not for the first time if her blood ran red or black.

Marriage is a mystery that one would be wise not to solve too hastily.
Marve De Jong, Love And Other Follies Of The Great Families Of Old New York

So this was betrayal. It was like being left alone in the desert at dusk without water or warmth. It left your mouth dry and will broken. It sapped your tears and made you hollow.

When girls use the brightness of their eyes or the softness of their skin, they have an uncommon advantage in getting what they want.

The world is such a marvel-it gave you trials, but if you were still and concentrated, if you tried to do the right thing, it always provided you with salvation.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Henry's worldly goal at the moment was drinking enough beer to be happy and forgetful.

To look in the face of hard things and keep moving forward - that's what one has to do.

It is well known that a man, when wooing a lady to be his wife, must first win over the females she most confides in - her friends, of course, and her sister, if she has one.

Heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery.

It seemed to her as though everything that was good and true had been blasted out of the world. All those things had been crushed destroyed made to disappear.

She should have know that villains often come with pretty faces.

That kind of love is always changing, you can never plant your feet on it. Trust me there will be others. But those kinds of affairs-you can't ever count on them like blood.

Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become.

Living too much in one's head can be dangerous.

A young woman, newly wed, may find herself in the delightful position of wanting to do nothing without the company of her darling husband. She may indeed discover that she spends all her waking hours with her fellow to the exclusion of every other friend or family member. This is understandable, but wholly unacceptable, to society.

From far away, on a clear day, she saw how all those mighty mansions were only temporary delusions, and how fashion would march on, and the chateaus and palazzos of American merchants would fall to the wrecking ball so that department stores might rise above.

She now saw that she wanted a boy to do more than follow her in blind devotion. She wanted a boy to challenge her, to tell her about things she'd never thought of, to show her new points of view.

He was just like summer, and she loved summer. If she had any wish, it would be to live a lifetime of summers.

It occurred to him, for the first time, that it did unflattering things to a person when affection was taken away from them. For there had been a time when she had seemed gorgeous, and fun, and all of her naughtiness had had for him a kind of irresistible pull. It was only after he decided he didn't want her anymore that she became a shrew, and obliterated his memory of the girl she used to be.

Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.

It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.

Darling, don't be silly, your whole future is ahead of you. All you have to do is go out there and ask for a part- something small and reasonable just to start with. From there, no one can stop you. Don't feel bad about anything you've done, and for God's sake, have fun.

It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.

Diana wore a men's bowler with the intials H. W. S. sewn into the lining and an old French army coat.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

Ah well that I can't tell you." Diana ducked her head so that the brim of her bonnet covered her face. "Some things must remain a mystery and for now I think I'll keep my opinion of you and your compliments to myself.

Don't go looking for boys in the dark
They will say pretty things then
leave you with scars.
Do go looking for boys in the park
For that is where the true gentlemen are.

I've always believed in savoring the moments. In the end, they are the only things we'll have.

But I wanted to tell you before I left how completely abjectly sorry I am for all the pain I have caused you and that if I die you were the one true love of my life. By the time you read this I will be gone but please know I am still always at your side ... Yours forever Henery William Schoonmaker

I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn't know what she has. That's the heart of it. She's like some wild creature who hasn't a clue the worth of its coat.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

She was realizing for the first time in her life what agony it was to experience such unquiet beneath an impeccable veneer.

I know it's going to sound funny, but I know you've been hanging around with that Billie Marsh, so maybe it won't be strange after all. Would you be my best man - or, I don't know, my best lady?

Good night.' Diana summoned all the dignity that she could manage in her bedraggled state and began to move back up the beach. Her dress was soaked and her stockings dotted with sand and her heart couldn't possibly withstand any more.

Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.

A young lady's most natural ally is her sister although sometimes our own relatives are as inscrutable to us as an antipodean.

There was plenty of life left and if he had to he would use it all to get her back. The time had passed for making promises to her-all that was left for him was to act.

She thought of Henry and Diana on the stoop gazing at each other with the confusion and sadness of two puppies who have just stumbled into their first puddle and not yet come to understand what has happened to them and found that she wanted to lie extravagantly.

Interesting people were her favorite hobby. She collected them: the type who did gay things late at night and smoked cigarettes in mixed company, those would have most scandalized her own mother.

Henry closed his eyes and imagined the sweet petulant woundedness with which she had stared at him on the beach. He felt a little proud that she could love him.

One did not win by throwing temper tantrums.

Edith who had still not fully recovered from the debauchery at the Hayeses' had glaced at the letter before dinner but she apparently lacked the energy to pry. "Oh to be young as you " was all she'd said before going to bed early.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

...she considered herself unconventional...

Teddy risked a look backward and nodded as he handed Henry his hat. The two men shook hands and then walked past each other Teddy moving in the direction of Henry's room and Henry the hat pulled down over his face toward the Cutting carriage that was waiting by the curb.

She was full of some strange energy that morning. Her every movement had purpose and life and she seemed to find satisfaction in every little thing.

Elizabeth who was only partially visible to her stared out the window very much awake as though she were contemplating the end of man.

Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.

Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

They were all dressed in their finest as though life really were some magical stage play in which every moment ought to be illuminated with its own bright spotlight.

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today - you have simply set the standard too high,' he said.

Sometimes ends are in fact beginnings; beginnings ends.

She had believed him to be hers, time and again, but still she could not stay the feeling that he might at any moment slip through her fingers.

Good girls hold their heads high by daylight,
Their grace and their virtue soaring with kites,
While bad girls slink along in their shame-
Everyone stares at them, everyone blames.
But those bad girls sleep soundly at night,
Ne'er do their consciences wake them in a fright,
While our good girls toss and they turn-
They lay awake for those who will burn.

Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl's time.

Recurrent memories of Henry Schoonmaker were the most exciting thing to happen in her conscious mind these days.

How she wished she had Elizabeth to herself for a little so they could discuss what Henry's real intentions were and also how high and mighty Penelope had acted at lunch and what a tremendous insult it was that she'd come at all and did anyone really think she was beautiful with those oversize features anyway.

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?"
"If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.

She wanted to walk slowly and smell the wafting perfumes of bouquets that men had bought for their sweethearts and watch couples holding each other tight as they dashed along the pavement on their way to or from something that made them grateful to be in each other's company. Going home felt the same as going to sleep, and she was too bouncing, too overcome with bliss for that.

A smiling friend was a true friend.

You love her," Teddy observed quietly. Henry replied with an uncharacteristic lack of irony: "Yes."
Teddy's eyes shifted to the plaster interlacing that decorated the ceiling in curlicues. "Lord, you never make it easy, do you."
"No.

She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she had has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations in richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories."
"But what will she eat, dear Grass?" Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically.
"Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, and the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy.