Auchincloss Quotes

A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

Keep doing good deeds long enough and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

In that moment I think I learned the real tragedy of living too long. It is not losing one's health or one's memory or even one's mind; it is losing one's dignity.

Today is not forever.

Snobbishness is a cancer in America because we pretend it’s not there and let it grow until it’s inoperable. In England it’s less dangerous because it’s out in the open.

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction...

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

What I really resent is that my graduates are not more different from his. For all my emphasis on the humanities and his on God, we both turn out stockbrokers!

a lifetime’s education was not the equivalent of a minute of Armageddon.

You’ve got to let the boys be animals once in a while,” he answered my protest as we walked away. “Social life was more attractive when gentlemen defended their honor with swords and not with lawsuits.

Which raised the question of whether she had ever loved, or even if she could love. And yet maybe what she felt was what everybody felt; maybe it was only the poets and romantics who had blown it up beyond recognition. Surely

Communication is everything to you artists. You can’t look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art.

I was sophisticated enough to know that the written word is no mirror of the writer’s character, that the amateur, though a selfless angel, may show himself a pompous ass, while the professional, a monster of ego, can convince you in a phrase that he has the innocence of a child. I

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

A drunk needs a reason to get sober,

It’s funny, isn’t it?” she later remarked, “all the compliments and nice things in the world can be said to you but if you didn’t hear them as a child—or even thought you didn’t hear them—then you just never believe them.

people just are who they are,

I didn't have to say another word, and I had the sense not to. I had gained Sumner's full attention, and that was all I needed. He looked at me; he really saw me, for perhaps the first time, and Pa thereafter got only his second glances. I won't say that I caught Sumner with three words, but they gave me a start. To keep up his image of the bright and thoughtful woman he had idealized for himself I had only to let him develop his own conception. I wouldn't have to do a thing until we get married. Then, of course, I could relax. Hasn't that been the story of millions of women?

The whole thing is so degrading! That a man like Eric should be reduced to crawling before those bloodsuckers who are taking every advantage of his weakened state. And strip himself of one whole third of his wealth to throw it away like all the huge sums they've already got out of him!

Polly's embarrassment revealed her regret that she should have given in to the age-old temptation of saying something disagreeable even to her oldest and most useful friend. But she had committed herself now. "I relate it," she replied in a bolder tone, "to my apprehension that you are using your perfectly proper wish to do great and noble things with Eric's money to disguise your equally natural desire to keep it out of the greedy hands of his family.

Well, be proud of it, then! And remember the James family in the Civil War. William and Henry ducked the draft and became famous writers, while their two fighting brothers were badly wounded and led wretched postwar lives!

No! It's not your fault. You belong to the last generation of women who have been brought up to use their sex appeal to further their ambition.

There's no point discussing an engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life.

And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She

Love was like the heaven the church in the old days had offered to the poor to keep them from rioting.

But I'm afraid you've blotted your copybook fatally with Clara.

Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married.

She even began to wonder if she had not slipped into a kind of solecism: that the world was only what Clarabel Hoyt perceived and felt, and that its morality and rules of conduct were purely of her own devising. If she was herself something of a work of art, she was also the artist. And what was sin then but a part of the backdrop against which she performed, acted, danced—yes, danced—like Salome before Herod? And the moment of ecstasy would be that when she pressed her lips against those of the severed head of the Baptist!

VIOLET LONGCOPE had, from the earliest signs of her daughter's incipient beauty, drilled into Clarabel's lovely head the warning that a single unwary submission of the heart to the wrong male charm could throw a girl perhaps irretrievably off the smooth tracks of the best laid life plan. The

Why should I reward his dirty tricks with my lily-white hand?

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed.

Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, once said of her. “No one I know looks like her, speaks like her, writes like her, or has a better idea of who she’s expected to be in the world. She was much too young to be widowed when we lost Jack. It wasn’t fair. But somehow, she goes ever forward despite a tragedy so great it would’ve destroyed most other women. Winston Churchill once said, ‘It’s the courage to continue that counts.’ I believe that’s true, and I have so much admiration for my daughter’s courage.

Dupree through

AT is the conviction that we need external validation to fill a hole deep inside and that in the event that our own impossible demands are not met, we must drink to fill the hole,

Let me not be proud at petty victories, and let me remember that if I should ever become respected by the boys, it will be my task to be merciful and gentle and kind. I am here, after all, to serve them.

The older I get the more I realize that the only thing a teacher has to go on is that rare spark in a boy’s eye. And when you see that, Brian, you’re an ass if you worry where it comes from. Whether it’s an ode of Horace or an Icelandic saga or something that goes bang in a laboratory.

A college president I know keeps three books on his night table: the Bible, the Iliad, and Louis Auchincloss' 1964 novel The Rector of Justin. When I once asked him, "Why the novel?," he responded, "Because it raises questions I cannot answer or ignore, the sort of questions that possess a wisdom apart from answers.

Every wave is the same, every wave is different, it’s a kind of infinity.