Sloan Wilson > Quotes

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

“Only masochists can get along without editing their own memories.”
― Sloan Wilson

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.”
― Sloan Wilson

“A birth usually has more consequences than a death.”
― 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

“We have tried to make the Eskimos hate the Germans. It is hard for them to understand. There isn’t really a word for hate in their language.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“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

“Even if it doesn’t,” he said, “there are worse places to spend the war than safely anchored in Milne Bay.” “You haven’t been here as long as we have,” we replied.”
― Sloan Wilson, Voyage to Somewhere

“Even with an understanding of Mowrey’s growing madness, Paul still found it difficult to accept the fact that the captain’s anti-Semitism now embraced radar, which correctly or incorrectly, he assumed to be the work of Jewish scientists. It wasn’t long before Mowrey was referring to radar as “Jewish magic,” or “The Jew Box.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“The Eskimos have a saying,” Swanson continued. “On the ice all men are brothers.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“We were directed to come into Pier Seven to load burial supplies for Okinawa. “Burial supplies!” I said aloud. “What the hell do they mean by that?” “White crosses for one thing,” the messenger said. “They need a lot of them up there.”
― Sloan Wilson, Voyage to Somewhere

“marriage had not turned out to be the long sexual revel he had imagined it to be. A lot of it had been that mysterious tension and fights.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“Did the Germans have such ridiculous problems while they waited in the shadow of sudden death? Paul guessed that they probably did. The possibility that they were sitting around praying was small”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“Forgotten now and little honored then, but still They’ll never have to wonder if they’re men.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“When, on the eighth day, he retired to his cabin and let his executive officer pilot the ship toward a distant mountain peak for a full hour without supervision, Paul felt as though Harvard had just granted him a doctoral degree. Even the fact that the captain shouted at him worse than ever when he returned after a brief nap did not dim his sense of accomplishment.”
― Sloan Wilson, Ice Brothers: A Novel

“He was puzzled but also pleased to find that these people he didn’t even like most of the time, and who didn’t much like him, remained so important to him.”
― Sloan Wilson, Pacific Interlude: A Novel

“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

“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

“There was a so-called joke that tanker men were lucky because they never had to worry about getting wounded and spending the rest of their lives in hospital wards. Some joke.”
― Sloan Wilson, Pacific Interlude: A Novel

“The trick is to learn to believe that it's a disconnected world, a lunatic world, where what is true now was not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a great many men mean nothing, and absolutely nothing, for now is the time to raise legitimate children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one's wife, and admire one's boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? That makes no difference, he thought—I'm just a man in a gray flannel suit. I must keep my suit neatly pressed like anyone else, for I am a very respectable young man.”
― Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit