An Albert Payson Terhune Reader Quotes

“Calder, happening into his office, not once but several times, in dull moments, caught Moreton heaping on a desk a heterogeneous pile of precious stones, for Lenore’s benefit. The girl—her soft eyes aglow, her breath fast, her lips trembling—stared in a sort of hypnotized ecstasy at the treasures. Timidly, at Moreton’s permission, she gathered them adoringly in her white little hands, caressing them and letting them seep through her slender fingers. Now, by a word to old Ziegerich, the detective could, of course, have put an instant and drastic end to these gem-seances.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“I’m running it. Not Mr. Ruhl or any one else. Get that through your head, once and for all.” “Looka here!” flashed Cleppy. “I don’t aim to let any man speak that way to my wife. Cut it out, before I—” “You’re fired,” ordained Banks, in his best voice. “Go to the cashier and get your time. I’ll not stand for any back talk or bluster here. Not from anybody. Get out!”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“All of which is a digression, but it is common sense and perhaps may one day save you from needless terror or from needless cruelty to an innocent animal.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“You say you’re shy. But you didn’t talk as if you were, just now. If you talked as eagerly as that when you called on those girls—” “I didn’t,” he said sulkily. “I couldn’t.” “Then how could you talk that way to me?” she asked. “Oh,” he answered, off guard, “for the same reason you talked as you did to me, I guess. You’re as badly off, in your own way, as I am. It’s—it’s more like talking into the looking-glass, I suppose. I don’t know why else.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“actually ordered some luckless youth to dance with me at the school receptions I had to dance with other girls or else sit by mother. I couldn’t understand it at all. It used to make me miserable. But it made me madder. It still does. There’s no reason for it. At least, none that I can see. I dance better than a lot of girls. And I’m no homelier than some of them. Yet I honestly don’t remember that any man or boy, of his own accord, ever asked me to dance or to go in to supper or called on me.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“We have one symptom in common already. Only you may think I’ve an advantage over you because I can change my name by marrying. Well, I can’t. I shall be twenty-four next April. And nobody ever asked me to marry. That means nobody ever is going to. So let’s pass on to the next symptom.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“My disease,” she said, speaking fast, “dates back to Bible days. Leah had it, in the book of Genesis. It is wallfloweritis.” “Huh?” broke in Harding, dazedly curious. “Wallfloweritis,” she repeated stoutly. “An acute and chronic case of being a perennial wallflower. Oh, please don’t be polite and silly and deny it!”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in the suburbs.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“There is no more merciless mental vivisector unhanged than Marcia Kibbe Klaw. Compared to her ice-bright scalpel, Balzac and Thackeray wielded wands of whipped-cream and swans-down.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“LOIS MADDEN was happy, very, very happy—until some one told her she was not. Happiness is a mystic bud that a single breath can wake into riotous bloom or wither to a shrivel. And it has no existence except in its possessor’s heart. That is why a breath, laden with a few silly cynicisms from a wise fool, was able to do all sorts of things to Lois Madden’s gladness.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“Ruyter’s mouth opened, but no word came. I noted that his lips were pallid. “With this man,” I went on, in the same slow, even voice, “with this man it is different. Mildred, this hero of yours—this Paladin of story-book seducers—is afraid. He is sick with fear. He would not dare meet my eyes, if he were not still more afraid to look away from me. He is half a head taller than I and thirty pounds heavier, and he is an athlete, while I am not. Yet he is more afraid of me at this moment than a clean man could be of anything on earth. The pitiful coward!” “You—you lie!” croaked Ruyter, but there was no conviction behind his denial. “He is afraid of me,” I went on, “because, to an animal of his species, I am that most terrifying creature extant—a husband. In me he sees the law, the punishment of the law, the ostracism of Society, the smear on his name that will last all his days. He sees more: he sees the one man in the world who can shoot him dead, at will, and whom no jury will punish for the deed. He is a wild beast for whom the ‘open season’ is any season I may dictate. I and I alone hold his worthless life in the hollow of my hand. I can kill him as I would kill a cat that has fits—and with no greater legal penalty. He knows it. And his courage has turned to water within him.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“People form their real friendships before they’re twenty-five,—generally, before they are twenty,—I think. Up to that time we’re trustful and hideously disinterested; and after that age we get to liking people for the amount of amusement or profit or inspiration we can drag from them. But, up to then, it’s friendship because—well, just because it’s friendship. That’s the way it was with us, anyhow.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“You’re doing it, just for the sake of a chance to spend more money than you need to and for an independence that is only another word for uselessness. You’re swapping the substance for the shadow.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“You don’t mean what you say. You may think you do, but you don’t. What has been right and natural, since the days of Eve, will keep on being right and natural to the end of the chapter. What has gone on for six thousand years is not likely to stop short and change itself, in a single quarter century. Nothing in nature has ever done that.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“Also, there was a dash and latent energy about him that set two hundred and five girls to re-reading Laura Jean Libbey with a new and personal interest. Lida was not one of the two hundred and five. She was sensible. And her ambitions were all sane, not based on literary trash.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“We had reached the bathing pavilion. There I checked the bag, together with my watch and money, putting the two last-named articles in a big manila envelope and writing my name across the back. I received in exchange a numbered metal tag on a thick rubber band. I followed Bat Shayne’s example of putting this band around my neck, feeling just a little like a licensed dog as I did so.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader