Janet Flanner Quotes

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.

Never have nights been more beautiful than these nights of anxiety. In the sky have been shining in trinity the moon, Venus and Mars. Nature has been more splendid than man.

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs but our mothers were Nightingales.

History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.