Jazz Age Quotes

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. ~ Sheila Weller

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed. ~ Hugh Hefner

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age. ~ Paul Whiteman

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the 'Jazz Age,' and now we're living in the Hip-Hop Age. ~ Baz Luhrmann

Something bright and alien flashed across the sky ... and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I am asking Scribners to insert as a subtitle in everything after the eighth printing
THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE)
A greater Gatsby
(Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Prophet of THE JAZZ AGE) ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one's head. ~ Pat R

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet - a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles - let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word "mother" and the word "kaiser" was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about - and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall. ~ Sarah Churchwell

Empire of Deception is a sure thing
a book guaranteed to entertain and make you rich (in knowledge, that is). Dean Jobb has found a fascinating yet little-known jazz-age tale and told it with style and smarts. Get in on the action. ~ Jonathan Eig

She clicked open the door and glided into the back seat like a summer breeze through an open window on the highway. "Where are you heading?", His Southern twang reminded her of home, but her eyes showed him no familiarity. She stared at him, void of expression, her thoughts racing. "Miss?", he persisted. "Anywhere. Please. Just drive.", she replied tersely, not sure if she even wanted her mind to join her in the back seat. The driver stared into her eyes and somehow understood, he started the engine and on they went. Two strangers, a blur of yellow, in pursuit of nowhere. ~ R.J. Arkhipov

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it. ~ William Kennedy

A gripper of a read ... Silence revives the cliff's-edge drama of those Jazz age climbs and drives home the tragedy of Mallory's death. ~ Bruce Barcott

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper. ~ William Kennedy

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world. ~ Ahmad Alaadeen

During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections.
[...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers. ~ Ted Gioia

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks. ~ Clement Alexander Price

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory. ~ William Kennedy

We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American. ~ Wynton Marsalis

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era's creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA. ~ Clement Alexander Price

It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it.

Isn't that something? ~ Karl Wiggins

Shortly after Senator Eugene J. McCarthy died in 2005 the age of 89, I became an honorary member of the committee starting a fellowship in McCarthy's name at his alma mater, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. ~ Kitty Kelley

You never told me how everyone liked the sirupskake."
"It was splendid!" she said, her smile returning. "Your fa- my husband asked that you bake another one soon for me to bring him."
Freya was always tripping over her words like that. Anna did the same thing herself. She chalked it up to wanting to say so much in a short amount of time. She was like a pot of melting chocolate: the words bubbled over.
"Did he like the candied oranges I placed on top?"
"Yes! He said he'd never seen it done that way before."
Anna shrugged. "I love to put my own spin on recipes. I like to be unique, if you haven't noticed."
"I have." Freya smiled. "I think my husband would enjoy meeting you. You and I have a similar joyful spirit, while he"- she sighed- "carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, I'm afraid. Much like my daughter."
Freya talked about her daughter a lot but unfortunately never brought her along for visits. From what Anna knew, the girl seemed whip smart and serious. Anna wished she could meet her so she could shake her up a bit. Everyone needed to let their hair down sometimes. Plus it would be nice to have a friend close to her own age. ~ Jen Calonita

I decided to retire from show business at the age of 17, because I didn't like it a bit. ~ Shirley Bassey

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age. ~ Sophie Swetchine

That machine's a great invention!" he said. "Other folks can stick to old-fashioned ways if they want to, but I'm all for progress. It's a great age we're living in. As long as I raise wheat, I'm going to have a machine come and thresh it, if there's one anywhere in the neighborhood. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father. ~ Shalom Auslander

I've always been very impatient. At age 10 I frankly found life boring, and I can remember age 9 having the awful thought, as it seems now looking back on it, A war! That should liven things up a bit! ~ Roger Bannister

My dear Guiliano," he said, "how is it that you and Don Croce do not join together to rule Sicily? He has the wisdom of age, you have the idealism of youth. ~ Mario Puzo

I hadn't actually watched 'Entourage.' But I do understand that if you know and love that show, Jeremy Piven is about as good as it gets. ~ Zoe Tapper

Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric. ~ Robert Graves

Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music. ~ Stephen Bruner

The advent of agriculture and civilization caused life expectancy to drop significantly, reaching a low of 18 during the Bronze Age of 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.. Life expectancy remained low (between 20 and 30) through 1500 A.D. and then climbed only gradually, reaching ~30 in 1800 and ~40-50 in 1900 in the USA and Europe. ~ Mark Sisson

But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the "feel" of it, and copying him, and this enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz artists who use the same approach. ~ Alan W. Watts

But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination. ~ Marcel Proust

Prevent postal investigators from aggressively interfering with, or closing, a commercial enterprise merely because it has been deemed not to adhere to the prevailing body of scientific opinion - whatever they have determined that to be. ~ Vin Weber

At my age, I don't think anyone is untouched by cancer. ~ Bryan Cranston

I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own. ~ Craig Finn

My mother got pregnant with me at the age of fifteen. This was '64, and unheard of at that time. ~ Dr. Dre

She saw it in her mind's eye like a movie playing, the haunting memories from her childhood she couldn't seem to shake blending together into one raw, aching image. Her mother lying in a darkened room for days, her face swollen with tears. The inevitable ashtray overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. The bed or couch or futon may have been different from year to year as Evie moved them around from apartment to commune to funky cottage, but her mother was always the same. Falling hard for some man, immersing herself in romantic fantasies that were crushed when the guy left. And the guy always left. Her mother's inability to get a grasp on reality had too often left Mischa to care for her younger sister, to care for her mother, from too young an age. She remembered shaking Evie awake, trying to get her to eat. To get up and take a shower, take her and Raine to school. No kid should have to do that. No kid should have to witness the way Evie had allowed herself to be ravaged by love. No woman should allow that to happen. ~ Eve Berlin

Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age - as it were - react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide. It's only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure - or at least satisfaction - in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown. ~ Iain M. Banks

Oh! How good it is to be your age! I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains of Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of the vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is... ~ Leo Tolstoy

Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain characteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. This is not always a paranoid reaction. We have seen that secularism has often been imposed very aggressively in the Muslim world. Fundamentalists look back to a "golden age" before the irruption of modernity for inspiration, but they are not atavistically returning to the Middle Ages. All are intrinsically modern movements and could have appeared at no time other than our own. All are innovative and often radical in their reinterpretation of religion. As such, fundamentalism is an essential part of the modern scene. Wherever modernity takes root, a fundamentalist movement is likely to rise up alongside it in conscious reaction. Fundamentalists will often express their discontent with a modern development by overstressing those elements in their tradition that militate against it. ~ Karen Armstrong

I guess I learnt to appreciate old Hindi-movie music from my dad and somewhere down the line picked up jazz as well. ~ Deepika Padukone

So easy, when you know how. ~ Fats Waller

Don't get too set on becoming an actor at an early age. I think that's where some people get into trouble. Acting becomes their life. I don't want that. ~ Freddie Highmore

Rock and roll mainly but I can play passable jazz also. ~ Suzi Quatro

Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures. ~ David K. Shipler

We get to go out into the schools and work with the kids on connecting them to their food at a young age, to actually see where their food is coming from, to see that their food is coming from the earth and not just from a supermarket. Once they make that connection, they can start to build upon that. ~ Jack Johnson

I don't want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man."
"Don't we all. Look. Be what you want
white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up - quicklike, and don't bring me no whiteboy sass."
Hunter's Hunter and Godlen Gray ~ Toni Morrison

Lilac was desperate to maintain hope by holding onto the love and protection she felt for Violet and Rose. They were so young and innocent; they did not understand the circumstances of their surroundings. They were both under five years of age; Lilac tried to shield them from the poison that had spread throughout their new house. She sensed the growing evil residing in their home and was desperately trying to keep its ugly claws from extinguishing her spirit. ~ Lali A. Love

I remember when I was 6 years old and my brother used to go seek out guys that were 13 to come over and play football against me while he was the 'permanent quarterback.' I didn't know exactly what the age difference was, but I was already playing against older guys. ~ Junior Seau

It should be clear to everyone that the nation's steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy. ~ Ronald Reagan

Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be approaching an Age of the Gross. Persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

The forces, movements, and energies that today we call religious, spiritual, or faith-based have related through the ages in diverse ways to the spheres of life that today we call economic and that we see embodied in business and commerce. ~ Martin E. Marty

The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. ~ T. S. Eliot