Amory Quotes

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The written word is the best thing that mankind has ever done. I'm glad to be a part of it! ~ Christie Amory

Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize ... that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions. ~ Cleveland Amory

The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose. ~ Cleveland Amory

I'm a practitioner of elegant frugality. I don't feel comfortable telling other people what to do, so I just try and lead by example. ~ Amory Lovins

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally - the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was tempermentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it. ~ Cleveland Amory

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating
after all, they are women
but they cannot be curmudgeons. ~ Cleveland Amory

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics". ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days? ~ Cleveland Amory

A package of 35 improvements to typical industrial motor systems can save around 50% of their metered energy ... with a simple payback under 16 months. ~ Amory Lovins

You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery. ~ Cleveland Amory

If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. ~ Amory Lovins

Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource. ~ Amory Lovins

The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously. ~ Amory Lovins

Really, nobody was there?" I asked.
"Well, nobody important," he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking. ~ Daniel Amory

We looked into one another's eyes, and I think we both knew in that instant that the past was behind us. We could never be to each other what we had been once. ~ Ashley Weaver

I've always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that's what I call a mans man. ~ Cleveland Amory

A 'good' family, it seems, is one that used to be better. ~ Cleveland Amory

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?" asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air.
My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, "Disgusting cardboard it is! ~ Daniel Amory

For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all. ~ Cleveland Amory

Killed so tragically in a plane crash, in a plane he was flying himself; David Amory, her grandfather, who was aboard that plane, ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

To anyone who has ever been owned by a cat, it will come as no surprise that there are all sorts of things about your cat you will never, as long as you live, forget. Not the least of these is your first sight of him or her. ~ Cleveland Amory

You can give of your talent, you can give of your possessions, or you can give of yourself. For God's sake, give something. ~ Cleveland Amory

Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The "Gold Coast" was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night.
The world's most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake's edge. ~ Daniel Amory

Amory: I love you.
Rosalind: I love you- now. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion. ~ Amory Lovins

I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras. ~ Cleveland Amory

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want
not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable ... 'very few things matter and nothing matters very much ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. ~ Amory Lovins

He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the "St. Regis' Tattler"; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

We've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. ~ Amory Lovins

On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. ~ Cleveland Amory

The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei. ~ George R R Martin

The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants. ~ Amory Lovins

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his
the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing
he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner ... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Look, girls know when they're cute," he said. "You don't have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn't have a job. I was like, 'How are you going to get a job there in this market?' And she's like, 'I'll wink and I'll smile.' She's a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen. ~ Daniel Amory

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question "How do we love all the children?" Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive. ~ Starhawk

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them. ~ Amory Lovins

Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions. ~ Amory Lovins

Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30. ~ Cleveland Amory

I want to go to Princeton," said Amory. "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes." Monsignor ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You won't find the word happy in any self-respecting grumbler's dictionary, no matter it's Christmas Eve or the any other day. ~ Cleveland Amory

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name. ~ Cleveland Amory

She loves swimming," said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college.
Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.
"Don't you Kara?" asked Ellen.
There was no response.
"I didn't start until I was three," said Ellen. "She's got a two year start on me. ~ Daniel Amory

If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer.
We find in design it's much more important and difficult to ask the right question.
Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious. ~ Amory Lovins

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat. ~ Cleveland Amory

Support your right to arm bears. ~ Cleveland Amory

Love makes a mess of things, doesn't it?' he said, as though he was speaking to himself. 'People are always falling in love with the wrong people. It happens over and over. It would be so much simpler if . . . ~ Ashley Weaver

It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class - I mean they're the best-educated men in college - the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on - the Pharisee class - Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors. ~ Cleveland Amory

I've officially turned into a loser," she whispered cynically. "I'm looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I've had my 'going out and having fun' quota for the year, I guess, and it's June. ~ Daniel Amory

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. ~ Cleveland Amory

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? ~ Amory Lovins

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind. ~ Cleveland Amory

Today we have a temporary aberration called "industrial capitalism" which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital, the natural world and properly functioning societies.
No sensible capitalist would do that. ~ Amory Lovins

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. ~ Daniel Amory

In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship-now they don't teach either. ~ Cleveland Amory

I'm not an environmentalist. I'm a cultural repairman. It's all about efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, prosperous and life-sustaining. ~ Amory Lovins

Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?" asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them.
"Why is it an either or question?" the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought. ~ Daniel Amory

For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the cold slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.

There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as, sun, wind and vegetation: on energy income, not depletable energy capital. ~ Amory Lovins

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I think along the way, as we treat nature as model and mentor, and not as a nuisance to be evaded or manipulated, we will certainly acquire much more reverence for life than we seem to be showing right now. ~ Amory Lovins

Our energy future is choice, not fate. Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have-and it's cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security. ~ Amory Lovins

A person has an idea about foreign policy or doesn't know one's arse from one's elbow. ~ Cleveland Amory

By skimping on design, the owner gets costlier equipment, higher energy costs, and a less competitive and comfortable building; the tenants get lower productivity and higher rent and operating costs. ~ Amory Lovins

The facts of life are very stubborn things. ~ Cleveland Amory

I will omit but I will not distort. ~ Cleveland Amory

There are only two ways out for animals at pounds
being adopted or being killed. And cats have such a low rate of adoption that many pounds, even in some larger cities, don't bother to take them in at all. Not for nothing is it always the "dog pound" and never the "cat pound. ~ Cleveland Amory

In the meantime, the porter's gone. How much time until we reach our next stop?'

I glanced at my wristwatch, an absurd fluttery feeling in my stomach. 'Nearly an hour.'

'Excellent,' he said, lowering his mouth again to mine. 'Let's make the most of it.'

And so we did. ~ Ashley Weaver

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth. ~ Daniel Amory

People ask me what makes a good funeral, and I tell them the most important thing is your man in the casket. If you have a man of substance in there, you have the makings of a first-class funeral. ~ Cleveland Amory

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: And Amory will have no other adventure like me. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed."
Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man
a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Nobody seems to bore you," he objected
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled so little at hunting her sentence. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

This is so funny," said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. "Isn't this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura."
I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura.
"That's better," said Ellen. "Isn't that better? ~ Daniel Amory

Amory usually liked men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was around him. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I am a man without a furnace. My windows are insulated by 19 sheets of glass which cost less than installing a heating system. ~ Amory Lovins

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl. ~ Cleveland Amory