Gentleman's Agreement Quotes

“THE CITY WAS ASLEEP. New York, the nervous, keyed-up city, was almost at rest two hours past midnight. Watching the sleeping stone under the quiet sky, the mind might know that there were still people laughing in night clubs, trucks and taxis still speeding through streets and avenues, swift subways underground still thundering into lighted stations.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Slow and unarguable, the old desire for love, for a close-shared life, struck at him, not with Kathy, not with Anne, not with any one woman. It was concept only, urgency in the blood.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.” There it was, uncompromising, noble— Jesus addressing the Pharisees. It was the everlasting choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who aren’t are their unknowing helpers and connivers. People who’d never beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about the whole business.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“He was a hoarder of books—he never could bring himself to throw any book away, so one or two of the ones he remembered owning ought to be somewhere in this conglomeration.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“There was something mysterious in the process of quarreling. You said one wrong thing and then tried to justify it and said a further thing. That in turn needed explaining or defense. All the time you helplessly knew that if you could only step off the treadmill of dissension and start anew--but something held you where you were with demoniac persistence. Then it was too late. Emotions came in; his face showed disapproval and surprise; anger spat in you that he should misread your motives. Or pride reared up and you'd be damned if you'd risk seeming abject and always at fault. The sense of crisis deepened, and your helplessness with it.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“When the book comes, Dad, will the game stop?” “I’ve stopped it already. About three weeks ago.” He’d never thought to tell Tom. “Why did you? You get tired of it?” “No, it just ended.” “Are you ever going to play it again?” “Not really.” Detailed explanation was beyond him. “Maybe in a different sort of way, though.” “If you just skip a game for a while,” Tom said as if to comfort him, “and then play it again, it’s just as good as if it was brand-new.” “I guess that’s right with ordinary games.” “But not with this one?” “No. If everybody knows it’s a game, you can’t go on with it because then they know you’re just imagining it and they stop playing.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Kathy waited for the waves of heat to stop running through her. She turned to the left and picked up the oversize serving spoon and fork. She put food on her plate and knew she could not eat it. Illness was in her, and shame for all of them. They despised him and they kept quiet. They were well bred and polite, so they kept quiet. Just as she did. Not making fusses was also part of the gentleman’s agreement. To rise and leave the room was not in her knees and muscles; to call him to account was not in her vocal cords and larynx.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“But, darling, if they’d been two Irish-Catholic girls, all you’d have thought would have been how vulgar all that make-up is in sport clothes.” She gulped. “You wouldn’t even have thought, Kathy, ‘All Irish-Catholics aren’t vulgar and overdressed.’ You wouldn’t have defended all the Irish any more than all the Hindus. Because you would have thought of them only as two girls.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Hold on a minute, Wales.” She looked up, ready to be offended. “Look, I’m the same guy I’ve been all along,” he said gently. “Same face, nose, tweed suit, voice, everything. Only the word ‘Christian’ is different. Someday you’ll believe me about people being people instead of words and labels.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“He hung up and turned to Mrs. Green. “Feels queer to have one right in our own family, doesn’t it? She’ll be in New York in less than a week, trying to justify everything.” “Stop that, Phil,” his mother said sharply. “I won’t have you saying ugly things about your own sister.” She was silent for several minutes and then started for her room. At the door she stopped.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Precisely.” They both laughed, and then Phil grew thoughtful. “There must be millions of people nowadays,” he said, “who are either atheist, agnostic, or religious only in the vaguest terms. I’ve often wondered why the Jewish ones among them, maybe even after a couple of generations of being pretty free of religion, still go on calling themselves Jews.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“were a tailor and it a gross basting cotton in a smooth lapel. All nonfiction writers—he remembered the long-ago days of his newspaper work and the discussions with other reporters—always tried to feel superior to all fiction writers. And fiction writers reversed the process and felt superior because they could create people and events which had never happened except in that world which sat between their foreheads and their top vertebra. The childish need to feel oneself bigger than, smarter than, stronger than”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“For a moment Phil stayed on, his thoughts rocketing back to Kathy. “When something hits into your kid.” Just names? Just exclusion? Or equally the sly corruption, the comforting poison of superiority? “Any place can be a hotbed, Phil; each house decides it.” His house would decide it for Tom—by a phrase, a nuance, an attitude. Each day it would go on being decided, through the rest of his childhood, through adolescence. A passion tore through Phil, to protect this one boy from that slow sure poison.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Those are the toughest fights,” Dave said dispassionately, “the ones about ideas. Suppose Carol was a faithful party-line girl—can you imagine our life? Or suppose she’d been an isolationist in the old days or pro-Franco? Families break apart over ideas. In hot times like these, anyway.” “Like the Civil War. Pro-North husband and pro-South wife.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“They’d fallen into talk of the atomic secret, the Pearl Harbor investigation, politics in general. “You were for Roosevelt?” Johnson began, and then added, “Sure, you would be.” “Why would I be?” Johnson hadn’t answered. Phil had let it pass. Flick.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Oh, Phil, I just think it’ll mix everybody up. People won’t know what you are.” “After I’m through, they’ll—” He couldn’t say it. A remarkable thing had happened. Something had seized him that he couldn’t argue with. It had started to happen with her first question. Now he knew suddenly what it was. This heavy strange thing in him was what you felt when you’d been insulted. He felt insulted. If he were really a Jew, this is what he’d feel. He was having his first lesson.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“He stood up abruptly. “Jesus, what’s happening to this country? A country never knows what’s happening to it.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“She wanted to tell him that she knew more about his inner states than he had told her, that she knew he not only wasn’t happy now but hadn’t been for a long time, so that possibly he’d forgotten how simple and good it was to feel happy. But she said none of those things. New Yorkers made greatly personal remarks to each other on first or second meetings, but perhaps people from smaller places would get tied up with constraint and embarrassment. He’d be miffed if he knew she thought of him as different from New Yorkers. He’d been abroad three times, he’d traveled a good deal in America, yet there was some of the air of a small-towner about him, indefinable but there.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Look, Tom. One thing is your country, like America, or France or Germany or Russia—all the countries. The flag is different and the uniform is different, the language is different.” “The airplanes are marked different.” This was interesting talk, his tone said. “Differently. That’s right. But the other thing is religion if you have any, or your grandfather’s religion, like Jewish or Catholic or Protestant religion. That hasn’t anything to do with the country or the language or the airplanes. Get it?”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Were all boys like this today, he wondered. In 1917, when he himself was eight, had he had so lethal a vocabulary, been so conscious of the other war? He decided not. There were no radios then, no Lifes and Looks—no newsreels, no avalanche of comic books about martial daredevils. For him during that war there had been only his parents’ talk about it, and the newspaper which came each morning. He’d had none of this war’s incessant instruction in the very sounds and colors and sights of killing and dying.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“What do people call a guy whose first name is Schuyler?” “Phil,” he answered, and everybody laughed. “Thank God, I don’t have to say Green all the time,” Minify answered. “So hearty, last names.” “It’s my mother’s name, my middle one. I started signing my stuff ‘Schuyler Green’ on the college paper at Stanford. Sounded ritzier to me, I guess, than Philip—like Somerset Maugham instead of William, or Sinclair Lewis instead of Harry. My literary heroes then.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Yeah.” Suddenly he felt obscure pride in himself. Tommy, at eight, without a mother since infancy, was relaxed, outgiving, never “the problem child.” Somehow, then, he, Phil, had done a sound job of concealing the unevenness of his own moods all these seven years.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Actually, the very oddness of living in a rectangular shelf of space rather than in a house set to the earth among bushes and trees had so far stimulated rather than dampened his spirits. He had sought basic change in the patterns of his life. This apartment was physical proof that he had found it, or, at any rate, one facet of”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Would anybody read five articles about antisemitism?” He saw Minify nod. “Three million readers?”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“They had known it, the patient, stubborn men who for years had argued and written and rephrased and fought over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They had known that injustice could corrupt the tree. They had known that its fruit could pale and sicken and fall at last to the dark ground of history where other dreams of equality and freedom had rotted.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“When he’d wanted to find out about a scared guy in a jalopy with his whole family behind him hoping for a living in California, he hadn’t stood on Route 66 and signaled one of them to a stop so he could ask a lot of questions. He’d just bought himself some old clothes and a breaking-up car and taken Route 66 himself. He’d melted into the crowds moving from grove to grove, ranch to ranch, picking till he’d dropped. He lived in their camps, ate what they ate, told nobody what he was. He’d found the answers in his own guts, not somebody else’s. He’d been an Okie. And the mine series. What had he done to get research for it? Go and tap some poor grimy guy on the shoulder and begin to talk? No, he’d damn well gone to Scranton, got himself a job, gone down into the dark, slept in a bunk in a shack. He hadn’t dug into a man’s secret being. He’d been a miner. “Christ!” He banged his fist on his thigh. His breath seemed to suck back into his lungs. The startled flesh of his leg still felt the impact of the blow. “Oh, God, I’ve got it. It’s the way. It’s the only way. I’ll be Jewish. I’ll just say—nobody knows me—I can just say it. I can live it myself. Six weeks, eight weeks, nine months —however long it takes. Christ, I’ve got it.” An”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“The anti-semite offered the effrontery—and then the world was ready with harsh yardsticks to measure the self-control and dignity with which you met it. You were insensitive or too sensitive; you were too timid or too bellicose; they gave you at once the wound and the burden of proper behavior toward it.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement

“Confidence, sureness, the freedom from his own ever-questioning-of-himself—she had that, and he envied her as he envied anybody else who was not forever involved with the weighing, the analyzing, the searching out he went through. She would not know the torment there could be in the fluctuating mood, the shifting decision, the wide swing between clarity and confusion, between cheerfulness and depression.”
― Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement