Being geniuses together, 1920-1930 Quotes

“I never felt myself an expatriate or anything but an American, but not through some excess of patriotism. My country is much too polyglot of race, type, and variety of faith, political and otherwise, for me to discover exactly to which qualities one would have to remain loyal in order to be a hundred per cent American.”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“Wealth, the war [WW1], and the phobias, manias, dementias, prejudices and terrors that come from both, were the dominant factors.”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“There's the belief that witty people are cruel, but they are perhaps less dangerous the the adulators who insist upon finding qualities in us which we have no desire to possess.”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“... I had some time ago decided that the money-makers on the grand scale are monomaniacs and fanatics and self-willed.”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“[Of cliques, groups and social intrigues] ... why be alive if you can't like the battle of measuring your contempt or indifferent or interest against that of others?”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“... nothing can compete with the vulgarity of snobbish or bought correct taste.”
― Robert McAlmon, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“The puritanical conscience is the coldest and cruelest of all the self-flagellating consciences to bear, for it stamps the sweet abandon out of life entirely. .... The puritanical conscience, with its little grey bonnet tied under its chin....”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“America, the only America that would endure, I believed now with a conviction as sharp as a knife turning in my breast, did not belong to Judge Thayer, or to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, or to the President of the United States, who had refused a shoemaker and a fish peddler his word of clemency. The American that lent me its direction forever now was Lola's, and it was Bill Williams, and Mother's and Michael's, and mine; and I knew, with a terrible humility in the presence of their innocence, that it was Saco's and Vanzetti's as well.”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“... our landlord and landlady. Their house, just outside the town, was quite a little chateau, and the evil that dwelt within its highly polished salons, that reclined on its lace-covered beds, and was coiled deep in the stuffing of its exquisitely upholstered chairs and sofas, was enough to make the blood turn icy in the veins.”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“That threshold lying at the entrance to each man's and woman's life, I knew without equivocation now, must be recognized and genuflected before.”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930