Peyton Place Quotes
"We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, and admire."
"If I can teach something to one child, if I can awaken in only one child a sense of beauty, a joy in truth, an admission of ignorance and a thirst for knowledge, then I am fulfilled."
"I don't go along with all the claptrap about poverty being good for the soul and trouble and struggle being great strengtheners of character."
"All I want is everything, and I want it all the time."
"Their sex habits are what the late Dr. Kinsey reported in people who have never progressed beyond eighth grade."
"I was living in the Midwest during the 1950s, and I can tell you it was boring. Elvis Presley and Peyton Place were the only two things in that decade that gave you hope there was something going on out there."
"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay."
"Why do you do it, Elsie? Why don't you go down to Boston or somewhere like that? With your intelligence and education you could get a good-paying job in business."
"He was a good man, in his fashion, with a strict sense of responsibility."
"Constance neither knew nor cared about the circumstances in which Allison's wife found herself."
"It's hard for a woman alone, especially trying to raise a child."
"She repeated silently, over and over, that life with her daughter Allison was entirely satisfactory and all she wanted."
"Men were not necessary, for they were unreliable at best, and nothing but creators of trouble."
"Perhaps because it was the only store of its kind in Peyton Place, or perhaps because Constance had a certain flair for style."
"It is better that she find it out from me than to hear it from a stranger."
"All the same, thought Constance, someday Allison will have to be told."
"The residents of Chestnut Street regarded themselves as the backbone of Peyton Place."
"The taxes a shackowner pays in ten years wouldn't pay to send his kids to school for one year."
"The idea that some squalid little urchin might catch cold running to the outhouse in his bare feet."
"If you go off half cocked, they'll turn on you the same as Leslie did tonight."
"If Allison were in my shoes, mused Selena, I bet she'd always be talking about half brothers and stepfathers."
"He could just set and scribble to his heart's content and never worry about the bills."
"It might not be honest, this omitting of r's and dropping of final g's, but his father had made a barrel of money in spite of it."
"This is menopause, and there isn't much anyone can do."
"I should be more careful. I almost made a fool of myself."
"I'll be the only woman in the whole world who won't, and I'll be written up in all the medical books."
"The coffeepot which she had not dropped when she fell now flew across the room in a direct line with Lucas’ head."
"Just like your old lady. I been decent to you just as if you was my own."
"Oakleigh Page was forgotten once his name had served to start the words flying."
"There's folks that just plain beg for trouble. Like Oakleigh Page."
"Better if he were a bastard than what he is."
"Show me the whore who knows what decency means."
"You're always afraid of something, Norman," she said jeeringly.
"I'll bet he still pees the bed," Rodney Harrington had been heard to say.
"You never can tell what a loony person will do."
"She's loony, you know. I've heard plenty of folks say so."
"It's time Hester thought about getting married. She's not getting any younger."
"If I were very thin and much taller, I could move like a bluebell in the wind, and everyone would say that I was the best dancer in the world."
"What a babyish outfit for a thirteen-year-old girl! I look like a child!"
"What if he doesn't think I'm pretty, she thought. What if he looks at me and is sorry that he asked me!"
"I should have put a stop to it in the beginning, even if it was only something she did around the house."
"It's the goddamned season that makes me so hard to get along with."
"My stomach is a little upset, but I shouldn't take it out on you."
"It's enough to make a Christian Scientist sick!"
"I don't know what's the matter with Rodney, you're much prettier than that fat old Betty Anderson."
"I'm pregnant," said Selena, and immediately bit her lip.
"Talk was cheap. It cost nothing to give voice to what you wanted people to think you believed."
"Make sure you never forget it then. Make goddamned sure."
"It was about to rupture. She's fine now, though. Sleeping like a baby."
"You miserable bastard. You miserable, lying sonofabitch."
"If I see you around tomorrow, Lucas, I'll have the whole town on your tail. Get out and stay out."
"We've seen to it that you had this house, and heat, and a car and a salary."
"You have to get plenty of them—and catch them while they are young—for lasting results."
"It's dark now, and she didn't know where you were."
"I didn't do anything. We didn't do anything, did we, Allison?"
"Today we pretended that we were at Walden Pond."
"I'm going to take Allison to see Matt Swain tomorrow. If she isn't the way she should be, I'll have your son arrested for rape."
"I've never, never been so embarrassed in my whole life!"
"You bastard! Just like your father! Sex! Sex! Sex! In that way, you're just like him."
"It is not the truth that is important, it was your cruel way of putting it to a child that will take some getting used to in my mind."
"She is going to be all right. She's only escaped, for a little while, into a shadow world. It's a fine place, extremely comfortable and provided by Nature for those exhausted by battle, or terror, or grief."
"I saw the starry Tree Eternity, Put forth the blossom Time."
"Time heals all wounds, and all life is like the seasons of the year."
"Scandalous occurrences, of a public nature that is, do not often take place in small towns."
"The difference between a closet skeleton and a scandal, in a small town, is that the former is examined behind barns by small groups who converse over it in whispers, while the latter is looked upon by everyone, on the main street, and discussed in shouts from rooftops."
"If we are not given the opportunity to right our wrongs before it is too late, it is something which happens to most of us."
"The purging of evil by fire, he thought, and laughed at himself."
"I've thought of each life as a tree. First there are the little green leaves, that's when you're little, and then there are the big green leaves. That is when you are older, the way I am now. Then there is the time of Indian summer and fall, when the leaves are bright and beautiful, and that's when you're really grown and can do all the things you've always wanted to do. Then there are no leaves at all, and it's winter. Then you are dead, and it's over."
"By coincidence, we happen to have been born on the same street in the same town. By an unhappy coincidence, I might add."
"How easy it is, how dangerously easy it is to hate a man for one's own inadequacies."
"The ease with which one man blames another for his own inadequacies."
"If every man ceased to hate and blame every other man for his own failures and shortcomings, we would see the end of every evil in the world, from war to backbiting."
"No one will ever be able to say that I do not measure up to my father in spite of my efforts, for I shall never try to measure up to him."
"If you don't care a damn about anything, it is easy to be tolerant."
"I'd rather be dead than not care a damn about anything."
"It's not going to be hard to take your money tonight."
"Excuse me, Napoleon. The doorbell is ringing."
"I'm pooped from being in court all day. Count me out of the game for tonight."
"Oh, I dunno," said Buck, in a superior tone. "Criminals often return to the scene of the crime."
"Maybe you oughta go after him and ask him if he hit Lucas over the head," said Clayton derisively.
"First, I'll get in touch with them Navy fellers and see if Lucas ever went back to his ship in Boston."
"Yeah," agreed Buck McCracken thoughtfully, and walked out of the diner to the shiny sheriff's car parked at the curb.
"If he didn't, then I'll begin to do some wonderin’."
"Wonder who that salesman worked for?" said Clayton.
"I can't understand it," said Selena levelly. "If Pa came home on leave, why didn't he come to the house?"
"It seems odd," said Miss Thornton coldly, "that neither of you two gentlemen have anything better to do with your time than the questioning of little children."
"Seems funny that Lucas'd come home and nobody'd know it."
"Lucas musta been keepin’ a woman that none of us knew about," he said aloud.
"Remember how Selena tried to squash the zonin’ at town meeting? I bet that was because she was scared somebody'd go out to her place and poke around."
"I killed him," said Selena in the flat voice which she had cultivated during the past few days. "And that's the end of it."
"If you'd just tell me why," Peter Drake said to her, over and over. "Perhaps I could help you."