Karen Abbott > Quotes

“Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested,”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“Mother was,' June thought, 'a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.' Her broken edges cut her daughters in ways both emotional and physical, and only sharpened with age.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“War, like politics, was men’s work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself,”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“A Republican is a man who wants you to go t'church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“Well, just remember this. When my ma got me, she picked what she wanted. But when your ma got you, she had to take what she got.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“Her mother was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any idea how to fix.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“He was just a taker. She was a taker in her way too. They were taking each other, and they loved each other for that. -June Havoc”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“Frank, as he preferred to be called, always believed that God was with him, protecting him even during—perhaps especially during—his transgressions.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“He spent all of his twenty-three years operating at only one speed and in one direction, furious and forward, convinced that a collision could only improve the ride.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“In a late interview, Belle herself characterized her life as if it were one long sin that needed to be confessed—with one pointed exception. “I have lied, sworn, killed (I guess) and I have stolen,” she said. “But . . . I thank God that I can say on my death bed that I am a virtuous woman. . . . Fortune has played me a sad trick by letting me live on and on.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“After nearly three years of dealing with Winder, throughout all of their delicate negotiations and volatile truces, she finally understood: he recognized her as a true patriot, someone who didn’t want to denigrate the South so much as nudge it back to where it belonged, a citizen stuck in a prodigal country. Because she was a woman—a wealthy, socially prominent woman at that—he tempered his suspicions with decency and Southern manners. He respected her dedication to her cause even as it diverged from his own, and the constant monitoring and attempts at entrapment were merely requirements of his job.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“A boy must do the job well, and develop personality. A girl must do the job well and develop personality. PLUS— Break down skepticism about her ability. Walk the tight-rope of sexlessness without loss of her essential charm. Keep up an impersonal fight against constant efforts to sidetrack her. Devote extra work and thought to making an opportunity out of every little opening. Make the hard choice between giving up children and home life in order to advance, or having them in the face of increased prejudice. And lastly, maintain a cheerful and normal outlook on life and its adjustments in spite of her handicaps.”
― Karen Abbott, The Ghosts of Eden Park

“As one prominent obstetrician put it, “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“Why the devil they have to put that ‘girlie girlie’ tea party description every time they tell anything a professional woman does, is more than I can see.”
― Karen Abbott, The Ghosts of Eden Park

“There was work for everyone to do, even the women—especially the women. They had to adjust quickly to the sudden absence of fathers and husbands and sons, to the idea that things would never be as they had been. They had no vote, no straightforward access to political discourse, no influence in how the battles were waged. Instead they took control of homes, businesses, plantations.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“I do not mind mankind’s crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word. -Al Capone”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“he insisted, since he’d earned something more useful than a GED—a GE, his “gutter education.” He”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“If the ship sinks, we're going down with a cheer and a good drink under our belts anyway.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“by a new burlesque trick: fish swivels affixed to her pasties. The mechanism allowed Finnell to pinwheel her tassels in any direction, from any position, at any speed,”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“You had to hand it to those reformers: They concocted better stories than the ones at the nickel theaters.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn’t knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“They never found Captain Henry, but Samuel finally got his answer from Belle: Yes, she said, she would be his wife. She believed that God had intended them to “meet and love,” and that He had purposely sent her a Yankee, a Union boy from Brooklyn. “Women,” she reasoned, “can sometimes work wonders; and may not he, who is of Northern
birth, come by degrees to love, for my sake, the ill-used South?”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“The only time I’d ever marry again is if someone beat on my door and said, “I have $27 million and I’ll live elsewhere.” –JOAN BLONDELL On”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted, greedy but frivolous with money, predatory but easily trapped.”
― Karen Abbott, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

“discover what could make you famous, and then proclaim that it already has.”
― Karen Abbott, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee