The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Quotes

“The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who'll say anything for pay.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness – they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“I could get a job in an advertising agency. I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Believe me, I want you to have a good time,' he said gently, 'but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Things happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“It doesn't really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Instead of getting the house like Mount Vernon, they had moved into the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, and Betsy had become pregnant, and he had thrown the vase against the wall, and the washing machine had broken down. And Grandmother had died and left her house to somebody, and instead of being made vice-president of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, he had finally arrived at a job where he tested mattresses, was uneasy when his boss said he wanted to see him without explaining why, and lived in fear of an elevator operator.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“She also explained the telephone system and brought from her desk a stack of papers for him to sign which placed him officially on the pay roll and insured him against almost everything in the world but getting fired.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“A birth usually has more consequences than a death.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“The war has sickened the United States by driving a wedge between men and women; the war has sent millions of men overseas to murder and witness death and have sex with local girls while millions of American wives and fiancées waited cheerfully at home,”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“There's something wrong, he thought. There must be something wrong when a man starts wishing time away. Time was given us like jewels to spend, and it's the ultimate sacrilege to wish it away.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Maybe they had no faith, Tom thought. Maybe they were like me, always expecting disaster, surprised only when it doesn't hit. Maybe we are all, the killers and the killed, equally damned; not guilty, not somehow made wise by war, not heroes, just men who are either dead or convinced that the world is insane.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Um ato a mais de brutalidade não faria o mundo acabar. Mas eu não vou fazer isso. Não posso fazer nada pelo mundo, mas posso colocar minha própria vida em ordem.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“O problema não era o fato de ele não mais acreditar no sonho; o problema era ele nem sequer achar sua improbabilidade interessante ou triste. Como um velho, preocupava-se com o passado e não com o futuro.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit