Alice Adams Quotes

“...I suppose about the only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“Is this life?'Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. 'Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to?”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“As with husbands and wives, so with many fathers and daughters, and so with some sons and mothers: the man will himself be cross in public and think nothing of it, nor will he greatly mind a little crossness on the part of the woman; but let her show agitation before any spectator, he is instantly reduced to a coward's slavery. Women understand that ancient weakness, of course; for it is one of their most important means of defense, but can be used ignobly.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“how much a thing means to one man and how little it means to another ain’t the right way to look at a business matter.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard,'Engaged'. She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon tables marked 'Reserved": the glance, slightly discontented, passes on at once.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“You see?" she said. "I've been leading you without you knowing it. Of course that's because you're new to the town, and you give yourself up to the guidance of an old citizen."

"I'm not so sure, Miss Adams. It might mean that I don't care where I follow so long as I follow you.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“We do keep looking ahead to things as if they’d finish something, but when we get to them, they don’t finish anything. They’re just part of going on.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“I’ve quit dressing at them, and if they saw me they wouldn’t think what you want ’em to. It’s funny; but we don’t often make people think what we want ’em to, mama. You do thus and so; and you tell yourself, ‘Now, seeing me do thus and so, people will naturally think this and that’; but they don’t. They think something else—usually just what you don’t want ’em to.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“Then don’t ask her,” Alice said, quickly. “Why?” “Because she’s such a perfect creature and I’m such an imperfect one. Perfect creatures have the most perfect way of ruining the imperfect ones.” “But then they wouldn’t be perfect. Not if they—” “Oh, yes, they remain perfectly perfect,” she assured him. “That’s because they never go into details. They’re not so vulgar as to come right out and tell that you’ve been in jail for stealing chickens. They just look absentminded and say in a low voice, ‘Oh, very; but I scarcely think you’d like her particularly’; and then begin to talk of something else right away.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been practicing them. “What’s the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell such lies? Why shouldn’t I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But which one is myself?”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“But, papa,” she said, to console him, “don’t you think maybe there isn’t such a thing as a ‘finish,’ after all! You say perhaps we don’t learn to live till we die but maybe that’s how it is after we die, too—just learning some more, the way we do here, and maybe through trouble again, even after that.” “Oh, it might be,” he sighed. “I expect so.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“a girl who’s talked about has a weakness that’s often a fatal one.” “What is it?” “It’s this: when she’s talked about she isn’t there.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a point: some people have dark hair, some people have blond hair, some people have gray hair. Until this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“I’ve had kind of a poor morning,” Adams said, as she patted his hand comfortingly. “I been thinking—” “Didn’t I tell you not to?” she cried, gaily. “Of course you’ll have poor times when you go and do just exactly what I say you mustn’t. You stop thinking this very minute!”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“when Alice came home from wherever other girls or women had been gathered, she always hurried to her mother with earnest descriptions of the clothing she had seen. At such times, if Adams was present, he might recognize “organdie,” or “taffeta,” or “chiffon,” as words defining certain textiles, but the rest was too technical for him, and he was like a dismal boy at a sermon, just waiting for it to get itself finished.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams [Annotated]

“For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a point...”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

“In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with blessing upon blessing.”
― Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams