Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

“It is our fancy for things ancient, more than for things beautiful, that induces us to lift marble mantels from Venetian palaces and to place them in Fifth Avenue houses,”

“If you see a fossil of a man, shabbily dressed, relying solely on his pedigree, dating back to time immemorial, who has the aspirations of a duke and the fortunes of a footman, do not cut him,” McAllister wrote. “It is better to cross the street and avoid meeting him.”

Mrs. Astor determined that for acceptance into society, one must be at least three generations removed from whoever’s hands had been dirtied in the making of money.

“A fortune of a million,” McAllister remarked to the New York Tribune, “is only respectable poverty.”

“In the hidden reaches where memory probes,” Consuelo would write, much later in her life, “lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”

“And I noticed,” Alva continued, “that the women grew stupid and morbid, that, like unpicked sweet peas, they went to seed while it was still blooming time and their great cry, midst all their luxury and material satisfaction, was ‘I am so lonely.’”

“the guest book reads like an international list for the guillotine.”

power devolved to the man who held the list.

“the pimple on the face of American literature.”

“Those born to the storm, find the calm very boring,”