Her Infinite Variety Quotes

“Which raised the question of whether she had ever loved, or even if she could love. And yet maybe what she felt was what everybody felt; maybe it was only the poets and romantics who had blown it up beyond recognition. Surely”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“No! It's not your fault. You belong to the last generation of women who have been brought up to use their sex appeal to further their ambition.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“But I'm afraid you've blotted your copybook fatally with Clara.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“Polly's embarrassment revealed her regret that she should have given in to the age-old temptation of saying something disagreeable even to her oldest and most useful friend. But she had committed herself now. "I relate it," she replied in a bolder tone, "to my apprehension that you are using your perfectly proper wish to do great and noble things with Eric's money to disguise your equally natural desire to keep it out of the greedy hands of his family.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“The whole thing is so degrading! That a man like Eric should be reduced to crawling before those bloodsuckers who are taking every advantage of his weakened state. And strip himself of one whole third of his wealth to throw it away like all the huge sums they've already got out of him!”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“Why should I reward his dirty tricks with my lily-white hand?”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“She even began to wonder if she had not slipped into a kind of solecism: that the world was only what Clarabel Hoyt perceived and felt, and that its morality and rules of conduct were purely of her own devising. If she was herself something of a work of art, she was also the artist. And what was sin then but a part of the backdrop against which she performed, acted, danced—yes, danced—like Salome before Herod? And the moment of ecstasy would be that when she pressed her lips against those of the severed head of the Baptist!”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“Love was like the heaven the church in the old days had offered to the poor to keep them from rioting.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“Well, be proud of it, then! And remember the James family in the Civil War. William and Henry ducked the draft and became famous writers, while their two fighting brothers were badly wounded and led wretched postwar lives!”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“There's no point discussing an engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life.”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel

“VIOLET LONGCOPE had, from the earliest signs of her daughter's incipient beauty, drilled into Clarabel's lovely head the warning that a single unwary submission of the heart to the wrong male charm could throw a girl perhaps irretrievably off the smooth tracks of the best laid life plan. The”
― Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety: A Novel