John P. Marquand Quotes

If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.

The mood is on me to-night only becuase I have listened to several hours of intelligent conversation and I am not a very brilliant person. Sometimes here on Pequod Island and back again on Beacon Street, I have the most curious delusion that our world may be a little narrow. I cannot avoid the impression that something has gone out of it (what, I do not know), and that our little world moves in an orbit of its own, a gain one of those confounded circles, or possibly an ellipse. Do you suppose that it moves without any relation to anything else? That it is broken off from some greater planet like the moon? We talk of life, we talk of art, but do we actually know anything about either? Have any of us really lived? Sometimes I am not entirely sure; sometimes I am afraid that we are all amazing people, placed in an ancestral mould. There is no spring, there is no force. Of course you know better than this, you who plunge every day in the operating room of the Massachusetts General, into life itself. Come up here and tell me I am wrong.

Nothing which is worth while is easy, nor in my experience is the actual doing of it particularly pleasant. The pleasure arises from completion and from the knowledge that one has done the right thing and has stood by one's convictions.

Most people in the world don't know who the Apleys are and they don't give a damn. I don't intend this as rudeness, but as a sort of comfort. I know it has been a comfort to me sometimes. Just remember that most people don't give a damn. When you remember it, you won't feel the necessity of taking the Apleys so seriously.

There can be no compromise between wrong and right. Germany is wrong and the Allies are right. The devastations of Belgium and the atrocities of the invading horde of barbarians are an outrage to civilized mankind.

I hope that I am as broadminded as others, and you have always seen a decanter of wine on the table.

Materialism has made you worship Mammon and in this material world everything comes too easily. Heat comes too easily and cold. Money comes too easily. Don't forget that it will go as easily as well. We have all grown soft from this ease. Position changes easily. Values shift elusively. When everything is totalled up we have evolved a fine variety of flushing toilets but not a very good world.

Some day you will know that there is a beauty of the soul that is more important than worldly beauty. Remember this when you see worldly beauty.

In the mornings when they were in the city, they had breakfast on a card table in Jeffrey's study

Gilbert was always saying that he loved people. He needed them around him. He was always saying that he loved me, and I imagine he honestly believed this, though of course his handling of my career reflected favorably on himself. Love never did mean quite the same thing in the entertainment business as in less volatile circles.