The Group Quotes
"Experience was just a question of learning through trial and error."
"The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened."
"Hypocrisy was the sole explanation she could find for the antiphonal bird twitter of 'Terribly nice,' and 'Isn't this exciting?' that had risen to greet the couple in lieu of a wedding march."
"If you were going to use a person, then you had to make the best of them."
"It would have been a confession of weakness."
"The idea that Kay might be enceinte had stolen more than once into her quiet thoughts, though Kay, according to herself, knew all about taking precautions and kept a douche in Harald’s closet."
"The girls found the fact funny, but D. H. Lawrence was one of her favorite authors: he had such a true feeling for animals and for the natural side of life."
"The best man was proposing a toast; looking up, Dottie found Dick Brown’s bright grey eyes on her again. He raised his glass and drank to her, ceremoniously."
"It’s just what I want for myself," announced Libby. "A young people’s wedding!"
"Great wealth was a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living."
"The depression, whatever else you could say about it, had been a truly wonderful thing for the propertied classes; it had waked a lot of them up to the things that really counted."
"Priss herself was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal; it ran in the blood."
"But seriously Priss could not imagine a more exciting time to come of age in than right now in America."
"What an odd comparison! If the group could hear that!"
"The party moved out to the street; the radio man, who had left his camera in the check room, took pictures on the sidewalk, in the bright June sunlight."
"Pokey Prothero’s voice, like a querulous grackle, intervened."
"Mother was quite right, she said to herself comfily, as she drifted off to sleep: it was a great mistake to let girls dance together as they did in so many of the boarding schools of the second rank."
"Tears dampened her eyes, though she tried to wink them back."
"A man’s life... Fishing and hunting. I like men’s talk, that’s never driving to get anywhere but just circles and circles."
"I liked you last night and I’ll keep on liking you as long as you want to come here."
"Every time you thought of the future, of the terrible complications a secret affair got you into, you almost wanted to give up and go home."
"The things you did in private were your own business, but this was practically public!"
"Medical instruction can often help the patient to the fullest sexual enjoyment."
"Any techniques that give both partners pleasure are perfectly allowable and natural."
"There are no practices, oral or manual, that are wrong in love-making, as long as both partners enjoy them."
"Keep your mind open and always ask for the evidence, even from your own side."
"Being late had nothing to do with it, despite what you've been insinuating in your clumsy way for the last two weeks."
"You pretend to accuse yourself, but it's me you're accusing."
"The thought of a comparison never entered my mind! It couldn't."
"I shouldn't have made us have cocktails. I should have thought of the strain you were under."
"I'll thank you for keeping your petty-bourgeois conscience out of my affairs."
"Believing in him was different from believing him."
"He was still fighting his father’s battles; any psychologist could see that."
"She had a ruthless hatred of poor people, which not even Harald suspected and which sometimes scared her by its violence."
"Harald’s play told the story of that. In the play, he had made his father a college president and put him at odds with the state legislature."
"This made it important to get the true facts into circulation, for it would hurt Harald’s career if he got the name of a troublemaker, of a person who went around wanting to be fired, needing to fail."
"Harald’s faith in himself gave his creditors hope, which made them extend charity."
"Harald would not go back to Boise till his father’s name had been vindicated."
"What worried Kay most, though, was that Harald was identifying with failure."
"She could always pretend that she had done it today, before she heard the news, and had not mentioned it on purpose, seeing how upset Harald was."
"And it could have happened that way; it was just chance that she had decided to take the samples home to show Harald, instead of settling on the one she wanted."
"The worst, from Helena’s point of view, was that she knew all this, knew, that is, about the mascot and the swimming hole and how she looked with the butterfly net."
"When I wouldn't let her pass it," corrected Harald with a melancholy air.
"A most villainous cake. 'Let them eat bread.' Don't you agree, my friend?"
"What can we do with them? Send them to the Salvation Army?"
"Giving the cake a Viking's funeral. A beau geste, was it not?"
"I always used to be scared when he disappeared like that."
"And it's getting late. And you have to work tomorrow. But you give me an idea."
"A gentleman never penetrated his bride on the first night."
"Underneath his bravado, I guess he's afraid too."
"We both know you're intelligent, and we don't want you to feel you have to tell Kay."
"Every experience is unique; what he does with her can't alter what he does with me."
"They ought to have learned that they could not enter a private residence without a policeman and a search warrant."
"The careless, cursory tone of 'Kay was working' had made her lips tighten."
"If I were a socialist, I would try to be a good person."
"You say your husband can't sleep with you because you're a 'good woman.'"
"Resolve not to mention sex. In any form—animal, vegetable, or mineral."
"Don't talk about yourself or Putnam to anyone but a lawyer."
"You're a precocious kid, but you're still in short pants, emotionally."
"He liked the sense of exercising his intellect which the world and general news gave him."
"Hatton made it a point to take no sides in American politics; he believed that it was against the law for an alien to interfere in the domestic affairs of a foreign country."
"What she did not know would not hurt her, poor lady."
"It was an excess of zeal that had prompted it, he recognized—a certain over-perfectionism, if that was the term, in the performance of his role."
"He initiated me, and I'll always be grateful to him for making it so wonderful."
"Sacrifice is a dated idea. A superstition, really, like burning widows in India."
"An unswerving faith, Dottie, moves mountains; you should have learned that from your religion."
"Men—unhappy, lonely men, particularly—respond to a faithful heart."
"The job she had been promised by a publisher, just before graduation, had not exactly materialized."
"Her background was perfect for a berth in publishing: fluent reading knowledge of French and Italian; copy editing, proofreading, and dummying as editor in chief of the Vassar literary magazine; short-story and verse-writing courses; good command of typing—all the tools of the trade."
"She spoke a breathless Italian, with a nifty Tuscan accent, and had been dying to take her junior year abroad, at the University of Bologna."
"It seemed to be Libby’s fate (so far) to start out strong with people and then have them lose interest for no reason she could see."
"She had put Helena, who was one to hide her light under a bushel, on the board of the literary magazine; then Helena had blandly turned around and sided with a minority that wanted to print 'experimental literature.'"
"Her family was jubilant; that was why they had let her have the apartment. Libby was obviously dedicated to the idea of a literary career."
"Most of the manuscripts Mr. LeRoy gave her were novels; biographies (which Libby doted on) he kept for specialists, and he had not yet tried her on a French or an Italian book."
"Libby wrote exhaustive plot summaries, for she did not want the whole burden of decision to rest on her, and she labored far into the night on her critical exegeses, making constructive suggestions."
"But in the very next issue a story she had battled for was discovered to be plagiarized, word for word, from a story in Harper’s."
"You do it on your own time, as you say, Miss MacAusland. But the function of the first reader is to save the second reader’s time. And his own. What you’re doing is uneconomic."
"Polly was a sympathetic soul; everybody she met told her their troubles and probably borrowed money from her."
"To look at, she was one of those 'gentle ray of sunshine' girls—very fair, with almost flaxen hair, the color of pale straw or rough raw silk, big blue eyes, and milk-white skin, bluish, like skim milk."
"Polly had majored in Chemistry, thinking that she might be a doctor, but when Mr. Andrews lost his money, naturally she had to give that up."
"Polly’s family, being brainy, liked these guessing games almost best, next to charades, but they played silly ones too, like 'I Packed My Grandmother’s Trunk.'"
"Having lost their money and had so much trouble, they kept cheerful by doing charades and playing games."
"All you had to do was tell her to go rescue some stick who was standing in a corner, and Polly would engage him in animated conversation and find out all sorts of wondrous things about him that nobody had ever suspected."
"Libby had balanced her guests carefully: a little bit of Vassar, a little bit of publishing, a little bit of Wall Street, a little bit of the stage."
"But the minute you started a game, be it poker or 'Pin the Tail on the Donkey,' Polly was in her element, delighted to sort chips or cut out pieces of paper or make blindfolds; she was always the court of authority or the umpire."
"This capacity for making lackluster friends, especially of her own sex, was Polly’s faiblesse."
"The group hoped she would meet some ravishing young doctor or pathologist who would want to marry her, but so far this had not happened or if so no one knew about it."
"No politics today," said Mrs. Hartshorn firmly. "We've declared a moratorium. Priss has to think of her milk."
"The miracle of the loaves and fishes, I call it."
"Medicine seems to be all cycles," continued Mrs. Hartshorn.
"Psychology is still a long way from being a science," he declared.
"Time to worry if he didn't cry for his dinner."
"The point is to have a schedule and stick to it absolutely!"
"You should hear him épater the floor nurses."
"We all trust a doctor who doesn’t believe in medicine."
"Bless braces, damn relaxes," she joked feebly.
"Relax, Mrs. Crockett," she said kindly. "Baby can sense it if you’re tense."
"He won't nurse," said Priss. The three women looked at each other and sighed jointly.
"The harder he works, of course, the more milk you produce. The breast should be well drained."
"Every pregnant alumna who’s heard about you wants to nurse."