1920s Quotes

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Marco would much rather wait, buy his mother a lovely house and then bring Isabela to visit, allowing his poverty to take on a romantic tinge, something from the past, roots safely buried.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“After endless cajoling, rationalizing, ego stroking, and outright begging—all to no avail—Isa decided that what Marco didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“She's a self-conscious vampire ... and she goes about using sex as a sort of shrimping net.”
― Noel Coward

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.”
― Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s

“The prosecutor uttered the party line that would distinguish revue from burlesque for the next thirty years. "The difference is movement. On Broadway, unadorned female figures are used to artistic advantage in tableaux. They do not move.”
― Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese / Fetish and the Art of the Teese

“Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“There is always stardust in my eyes when I look at you, my love.”
― Ellen Read, The Dragon Sleeps

“Well, ha-jolly-ha to YOU, young Stiffie-- with knobs on!”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.”
― Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

“Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.”
― William Kennedy, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.”
― john darnton, Almost a Family: A Memoir

“The spicy sweet fragrance of the large full blooms, which rambled over the side and top of an arched metal framework, welcomed them as they walked beneath them. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy, dust motes floating languorously in the golden beams that spotlighted clumps of wayward snowdrops growing in the lawn.”
― Ellen Read, The Dragon Sleeps

“It was your father’s misfortune that a hoodlum confessed to the crime, as opposed to someone upstanding like, say, the President of General Motors.”
― Margo Laurie, The Anarchist's Wife

“Someone has to unbutton the stuffed shirts of the beau monde.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“The rest of us have to play along with God’s little game of Russian roulette, His eternal lesson to live it up while you can. And far be it for me to turn away from God—let’s get a drink.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“I like the word yet,” Niamh said. “Yet is hopeful, don’t you think?”
― Ellen Read, The Butterfly's Cocoon

“Всі, кого вона знала, були закохані в неї максимум місяць, та й зовсім інакше закохані, бо хотіли її обійняти, поцілувати, покласти їй руку на коліна, а один на першому побаченні схопив її і крикнув: «Будь моя!» Вигнаний, він пішов, не дуже образившись, і сказав на відході: «Я так і знав, що ви міщанка».”
― Валер'ян Підмогильний, Невеличка драма (Vivat Класика)

“An air of malaise had spread through Café Society and quite acutely in her coterie, friends impatient to find their way to the lightness, their place in the sun. The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Men who once were titans of business now were unrecognizable to their friends, friends that found refuge at their homes in Newport and the Gold Coast, places with vodka and rare art and pretty dresses.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“She had seen the faces of shattered dreams, the zippy Ziegfeld girls, the doll-faced divorcées, the wellborn wives in opulent ivory towers, knocked down and knocked right out.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Oh good, the Algonquin Twit isn’t here.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela Hamilton

“An air of malaise had spread through Café Society and quite acutely in her coterie, friends impatient to find their way to the lightness, their place in the sun. The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“She had seen the faces of shattered dreams, the zippy Ziegfeld girls, the doll-faced divorcées, the wellborn wives in opulent ivory towers, knocked down and knocked right out.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“There is always Stardust in my eyes, when I look at you, my love.

Murder at Thornton Park.”
― Ellen Read

“Time meant nothing.
She loved him in an instant.
She would love him forever.”

Murder at Thornton Park”
― Ellen Read, Murder at Thornton Park

“It was a time of astonishing courage, a time of betrayal and disaster […] when girls and boys thought nothing of stepping into the clear blue sky.”
― Rodman Philbrick, We Own the Sky

“Margaret Smith was so appalled at the role she was expected to play as the wife of a tea planter in the 1920s that she left her husband and became a militant feminist in Britain.”
― Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj