Carl van Vechten > Quotes

“Cats have gnosis to a degree that is granted to few bishops.”
― Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat

“Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself?”
― Carl Van Vechten, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works

“A thing of beauty is a boy forever.”
― Carl Van Vechten, Blind Bow-Boy

“Paris is not a city I should care to approach for the first time after I had passed forty.”
― Carl Van Vechten, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works

“Well, she said, that picture is the kind of picture that gives pleasure to the kind of people who like that kind of picture.”
― Carl Van Vechten, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works

“It was not so much, Paul was beginning, justifiably, to believe, to support extravagant wives that men toiled in the city, as was the opinion generally expressed, especially by foreign visitors, as it was to escape from these wives. (….) They were having, he was by way of informing himself, an extraordinarily good time. To be sure, they dashed nimbly after the dollar, but even that part of the game resembled gambling or fox-hunting. It was an adventure replete with frills, false trails, happy discoveries, comic coincidences. There was so much, indeed, of sportsman's luck in everything that went on there that Wall Street was prone to impress him as a kind of glorified Monte Carlo, the Circassian walnut cabinets in each office, stored with liquors and tobacco, supplying the place of the bar, while the Stock Exchange made an excellent substitute for the salle de jeu.”
― Carl Van Vechten, Firecrackers