Marjorie Morningstar Quotes

“Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter. You stay inside it, and you’re less vulnerable to whatever horrors happen in life.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off. ”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What's driving him? Not ambition. He’s been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He’d rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“She didn’t waver or change countenance at all; she continued her grave descent. But in an instant, as though green gelatins had been slid one by one in front of every light in the ballroom, she saw the scene differently. She saw a tawdry mockery of sacred things, a bourgeois riot of expense, with a special touch of vulgar Jewish sentimentality. The gate of roses behind her was comical; the flower-massed canopy ahead was grotesque; the loud whirring of the movie camera was a joke, the scrambling still photographer in the empty aisle, twisting his camera at his eye, a low clown. The huge diamond on her right hand capped the vulgarity; she could feel it there; she slid a finger to cover it. Her husband waiting for her under the canopy wasn’t a prosperous doctor, but he was a prosperous lawyer; he had the mustache Noel had predicted; with macabre luck Noel had even guessed the initials. And she—she was Shirley, going to a Shirley fate, in a Shirley blaze of silly costly glory. All this passed”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“She was, in fact, Katharine Hepburn, playing a store clerk in the first reel of a smart comedy”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“It’s not money, but what you can buy with it. Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don’t eat bacon. I’ve seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse.” “Well, I can’t help that, it’s habit.” Noel shook”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“The old novels are all about Jane Austen and Dickens heroines who'd as soon put bullets through their heads as let a man kiss them. And, the new novels are...about Brett Ashley, who sleeps with any guy who really insists, but is a poetic pure tortured soul at heart....She talks Lady Brett and acts Shirley, handling the situation on the whole with remarkable willpower----'...'It doesn't take too much willpower, ' Marjorie burst out,...'with most of the boys, who are plain animals, and just need slapping down. And it doesn't take much willpower either wth the conceited intellectuals who try to disarm you by telling you that you're frigid. They're just amusing.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Morgenstern settled the matter, in her customary way, by going into the kitchen and coming out with a large soup plate from her best china set. She called the couple to the dining-room table, and told them to take hold of the plate and break it on the table. They did so, looking puzzled at each other. The fragments flew all over the floor, and the parents embraced each other, shouting”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder stopped”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“I have a heart of gold. My only faults are that I’m totally selfish and immoral.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“They could take a religion apart and show how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it back together so it would work for anybody. I mildly suggested that the day was past, maybe, when religion could work for any educated person. She flared a bit; said religion still worked for a hell of a lot of people. She said her parents would never have survived the death of Seth without it, and that she didn’t know whether she and Milton could have stayed in one piece after the baby died if they hadn’t had their religion. At this point I was probing, perhaps cruelly, to strike bottom. I said, “Well, Margie, maybe that only proves the power of a dream.” Like a flash she answered—and her voice sounded just as it did in the old days, full of life and sparkle, “Who isn’t dreaming, Wally? You?” The fireworks started around then, all green and golden and red, over the sound.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“rabbis knew best. The marvelous warmth and intimacy of your ceremonies tonight! Even the little family quarrel only made things more lively. It gave the evening—well, tang. I was going to say bite, but I’d better not.” He paused skillfully for the laugh. “The little Hagada, with its awkward English and quaint old woodcuts, has been a revelation to me. I’ve suddenly realized, all over again, that I’m part of a tradition and culture that go back four thousand years. I’ve realized that it was we Jews, after all, with the immortal story of the Exodus from Egypt, who gave the world the concept of the holiness of freedom”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“experience nine times out of ten is merely stupidity hardened into habit.—Well,”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Rose, you’re good, you’re like a sister.” The mother expelled a long sigh, puffing out her cheeks. She looked from the girl to the old man. “I keep trying to fix everything. Why? It’s God’s world.” She kissed them both. “Take care of yourselves. And…”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“main”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“about Sidney, who wants to be a writer or a forest ranger or a composer or anything except what his father is, because he’s ashamed of his father being a Jew, or because he thinks he’s too sensitive for business or law, whatever the damned Freudian reason may be—and he ends up in his father’s business just the same. I’ve opened my apartment door to enough of those.” Noel crooked”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Phil’s a slow-thinking sort, so I usually tied him up. He’s one of the few communists I’ve ever been able to stand. They’re like the abolitionists. Their cause may be just, but their personalities are repulsive. I don’t really know whether they’re right or not, and I don’t care.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“And my revulsion wasn't against your religion, but all religions. They’re all more or less alike. You can’t blame the human race for preferring some bright storyteller’s dream or other to the black cold meaningless dark of the real universe.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Marjorie, darling, listen to me. You know—God knows—you’re not the first girl in my life nor the second, but I swear to you this is new. The reason you’re so crazily in love is that I am, too. There’s no other reason. It happens once in a lifetime to everyone, and I swear to God I’m beginning to think it’s happened for us.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world—the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls. As long as there were two, there could be three, or ten; it was a question of good luck or God’s blessing when she would”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“she had had nightmares of being pursued through Berlin by storm troopers. But it had never seemed quite real to her that somewhere on the face of the solid green earth human beings were doing to other human beings what the papers said the Nazis were doing to the Jews. She hoped that in the end the atrocities would turn out to be mostly newspaper talk, like the World War stories of the Huns eating Belgian babies. Her conscience had pricked her from time to time into giving part of her savings to refugee organizations. Beyond that, her mind was closed to the Nazis. She said uneasily, “You know, I’m ashamed of myself.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“to you, I have never known anything like it. But I have brains enough to know that a bed takes up a very small space in a house, and that you don’t spend a marriage sleeping with a person but waking with her. It’s the waking part with you that I will no longer endure, come hell or high water. I will not be driven on and on to that looming goal, a love nest in the suburbs. I WANT NO PART OF IT OR OF YOU, do you understand? If I had”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“took a couple of pork slices; and by dipping them completely in mustard sauce she got them down without any trouble. Eating the pork gave her an odd sense of freedom, and at the same time, though she suppressed it, a twinge of disgust. She asked Noel for another highball.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“tell you. Fun is worth having. And love. And beauty. And travel. And success—My God, there is so much worth having, Dad!” It felt very queer to be talking to her father about herself in earnest, as though he were Noel Airman or Marsha Zelenko. It was like blurting confidences to a new friend whom she wasn’t sure she could trust. But she was enjoying it. “The finest foods are worth having, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art. Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities, instead of becoming just one more of the millions of human cows! Children,”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“Marjorie, my sweet, we’ve fallen in love with each other, that’s all. You love me. I love you. Don’t lose any sleep over it.” Electric stings ran through her arms and legs. She put”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar