Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be considered a good guy.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

The truly ambitious are always as busy on the landings as they are breathless on the stairs.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.

Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.

A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.

On any morning these days whole segments of the population wake up to find themselves famous, while, to keep matters shipshape, whole contingents of celebrities wake up to find themselves forgotten.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.