Consuelo Vanderbilt Quotes

It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it.

I can do this, I told myself. Somehow, I will survive and thrive.

William Henry altered his will nine times in six years, as he fretted over how best to bequeath such a legacy.

he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man.

he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden,’ he is quoted as saying.

Cornelius Jeremiah

In 1882 he shot himself in the Glenham Hotel in New York, leaving debts of over $15,000. An undignified auction of his belongings compounded the disgrace of a family suicide.

She wasn’t one of those girls who lived for the explosion of excess lavished on one single day, Consuelo Vanderbilt, May Goelet. Even as a child, she’d never spent hours daydreaming about her wedding; it all seemed rather silly to her. Surely the most important part of it all wasn’t that day. It was every day after.

the word ‘millionaire’ was only coined by journalists in 1843 to describe the estate left by the first of them, the tobacconist Peter Lorillard. In 1845, the millionaire phenomenon was still so rare that the word was printed in italics and pronounced with rolling ‘rs’ in a flamboyant French accent.

I had too much power before I knew how to use it and it defeated me in the end. It drove all sweetness out of my life except the affection of my children.

built from white stone with grey slate towers standing in a park which Alva furnished with small spotted deer who were fed chocolate at dusk.

snow-covered garden

Pine Hollow

Dorothy Schiff,

the ‘Dynasty’ culture of the Reagan era, that bore so many similarities to the cruelties of the Gilded Age.

Edna Woolman Chase,

I am glad you appreciate the past. History helps make the present,

Tradition, indeed, but the present is built on the past.

The beauty here was luring but deceptive.

Whatever our position in life, we can make the best of it.

there may come a time when you must go on, be strong without a friend until you can make new ones, stand on your own.

One thing I have learned from Mama is to fight for what I want,