Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be considered a good guy.

If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.

Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

The truly ambitious are always as busy on the landings as they are breathless on the stairs.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.