Flapper Quotes

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.

Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted

Hot off the presses, today’s headlines: The love of your life does not approve of my wanton flapper ways,” Evie said in a voice of affected mystery. “Really, Mabesie. You might want to reconsider—he is a bit of a killjoy.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

What was it? Why won't you tell me?" "I don't want to break down your illusions." "My dear man, I have no illusions about you." "I mean illusions about yourself.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.

What's the point of living if it's going to be easy?

Less flapping, more flying!

To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong-- or else a coward. I'm neither.

(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all my parts.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.

When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it--and not get caught.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few.

(...)"Flapper"— the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith- faith in the eternal resilience of me- that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide- not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often- and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!

We're going through the black air with our arms wide and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves.

I thought you weren't afraid." "I never am --but I won't throw my life away just to show one man I'm not.

this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding—it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

You seem to be bankrupt - morally as well as financially

Her sigh was a benediction—an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside. Up

EFFERVESCENCE AND EVANESCENCE We've found this Scott Fitzgerald chap A chipper charming child; He's taught us how the flappers flap, And why the whipper-snappers snap, What makes the women wild. But now he should make haste to trap The ducats in his dipper. The birds that put him on the map Will shortly all begin to rap And flop to something flipper.

In a weird sort of way, cursed forests and evil wraiths aren't half as terrifying as the thought that all the things that have given you hope may not be real at all.

II Hollywood Flapper Oh, come my love and join with me The oldest infant industry. Come seek the bourne of palm and pearl, The lovely land of boy-meets-girl. Come grace this lotus-laden shore, The isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before. Come curb the new and watch the old win, Out where the streets are paved with Goldwyn. – Dorothy Parker

... I used to build dreams about you.

That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.

I don't believe in wishes. Or maybe I just have too many.

My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

Resignedly and with difficulty Tom removed the cigar—that is, he removed part of it, and then blew the remainder with a whut sound across the room, where it landed liquidly and limply in Mrs. Ahearn’s lap.

College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life—literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.

You see, when you were little they kept sending me snap–shots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyes—and I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near me—even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: 'Look here at me! See, I'm Life. You're turning your back on it!' All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful.

Let’s build a town where

my yacht. I don’t mind going for a coupla hours’ cruise. I’ll even lend you that book so you’ll have something to read on the revenue

the ten little niggers, the

Which are you?” “I’m feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an’ most of these girls

My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.

You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.

negroes’ voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them singing before. “Time is

There’s a difference somewhere.” Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently

I don't understand yet how it all happened.' 'Neither do I.' He smiled grimly. 'I guess these baby parties are pretty rough affairs.

But, of course, you've either got to amuse people or feed 'em or shock 'em." Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde.

Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness

If you wanted to disappear, this would be the place to do it. Outside the city limits, the nights are dark and old, and people who vanish are never seen again.

I'm not sure what I'll do, but – well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

If skirts get any shorter, said the flapper with a sob, I'll have two more cheeks to powder and a lot more hair to bob!

In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute;

If she's a flapper," mused the sergeant, wiping Passionate Rouge lipstick off his blameless mouth, "then I'm all for 'em, and I don't care what Mum says.

Prohibition! Everyone loves a flapper dress or a fake tommy gun, but who remembers the thousands of people who went blind drinking unregulated wood alcohol?

I'd feel I was... wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy – the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere. that'll last when I'm not beautiful anymore.

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.

Like I could take a nap at 4:15 p.m. and then I'll wake up twenty minutes later and have absolutely no clue where I am. I'm like, "What era is this? Is it the 1920s? Am I a flapper? Should I go and put on a flapper costume and go flap at a party?" Then I'm like, "Is that what flappers even do? Flap? Is flapping a verb?" I'm that out of it. And I'm also drenched in sweat. Like some little Dutch boy in knickers ran over to me while I was sleeping and poured a bucket of water on me. Or like I have malaria and it's 1932 and I'm surrounded by mosquito netting. I'm drenched. I'm covered in goo. I'm like a baby deer covered in placenta hobbling around trying to learn how to walk, thinking that it's the 1920s and I'm a flapper and there's a little Dutch boy running around with a bucket of water. That's what naps are like for me.

It is the custom to look back on ourselves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror...But it had its virtues, that old boom: Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory.

They were married by a lesbian justice of the peace while their friends played a guitar-feedback-heavy version of the "Wedding March." The bride wore a white-fringed flapper dress and black spiked boots. The groom wore leather.

Consider the cartoon character of Betty Boop.” “The baby-voiced twenties flapper with the huge eyes and the spit curls…boop-boop-a-doop?” “The cartoon was based on a singer named Helen Kane, but Kane grabbed her share of glory by imitating another singer, Annette Hanshaw. Both Kane and Hanshaw are pop culture footnotes today, almost a hundred years later, but Betty Boop has become a commercial icon of the flapper and lives on in cheesy merchandise everywhere.

Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven?

Leo could admire the intricate workmanship, but it was too much, too bright, too flashy. If her wings had been solar panels, Nike would’ve produced enough energy to power Miami. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘could you fold your flappers, please? You’re giving me a sunburn.

My lesbian translator must be on the fritz. Is that code for your period? Instead of calling it an Alexandria Tampon how about a bloody Mary?” He snaps his fingers and continues, “This bloody Mary is giving me the cramps or Damn you, bloody Mary for ruining my sex life.” Robert Marshall, Flapper Girls

you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.

He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived—and yet was he worth anything at all?

She did as she pleased, regarding life as 'an inexhaustible counter', from which she seemed to be continually picking out presents for herself.

It is more about the person you are, rather than what you have done that makes you special.

A flaming red flapper dress, a sleek black dress with full, satin purple sleeves and a matching flounce, a summery cotton frock with a cheerful red poppy print, and a musketeer's gold-trimmed jacket tumbled out of the pile of clothing. A mound of scarves fluttered onto the bed. Marge fingered the frayed, tasseled edge of a silk jacquard scarf in shades of amethyst and emerald green.

A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree.... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.

That night Serena dressed to meet Zahi. She used a metallic green eye shadow on the top lids and the outer half of the bottom lids so that her eyes looked like a jungle cat's. Two coats of black mascara completed them, and then she smudged a light gold gloss on her lips. She took a red skirt from the closet. The material was snakelike, shimmering black, then red. She slipped it on and tied the black strings of a matching bib halter around her neck and waist. She painted red-and-black glittering flames on her legs and rubbed glossy shine on her arms and chest. Finally, she took the necklace she had bought at the garage sale and fixed it in her hairline like the headache bands worn by flappers back in the 1920's. The jewels hung on her forehead, making her look like an exotic maharani. She sat at her dressing table and painted her toenails and fingernails gold, then looked in the mirror. A thrill jolted through her as it always did. No matter how many times she saw her reflection after the transformation, her image always astonished her. She looked supernatural, a spectral creature, green eyes large, skin glowing, eyelashes longer, thicker. Everything about her was more forceful and elegant- an enchantress goddess. She couldn't pull away from her reflection. It was as if the warrior in her had claimed the night.

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible.

No, no, it’s not me, it’s them—that old time that I’ve tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn’t have been ‘unknown’; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world—the dead South. You see,” she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, “people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I’ve always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren’t any disillusions comin’ to me. I’ve tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige—there’s just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us—streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an’ stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn’t ever make you understand but it was there.

As a writer, his vision was maturing. He could see that Gatsby’s desperate wish to reclaim his perfect love with Daisy was part of the bright, precarious dream of his own generation, a dream that confused the ownership of beautiful things with happiness and freedom.* Scott

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I had ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a VAD, and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

Let's go down there!" She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill where along the green turf were a thousand grayish-white crosses stretching in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a battalion. "Those are the Confederate dead," said Sally Carrol simply. They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name and a date, sometimes quite indecipherable. "The last row is the saddest—see, 'way over there. Every cross has just a date on it and the word 'Unknown.'" She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears. "I can't tell you how real

Scott had learned much about girls when he was courting Zelda: the paradoxical mix of dependency and disdain she felt for her own beauty, the small tragedies and triumphs of her teenage life. In transferring these nuances to Rosalind, he became one of the first writers in post-war America to evoke a complex, modern heroine.

Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party's "Roaring Twenties" theme- chosen to commemorate the end of Kat's own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook- a wizened Malay man who'd brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan.

Girls had changed. They had liberated themselves from their corsets only to throw themselves at the tyranny of the "diet plan." They were all coltish legs, bound chests and smooth scalps. They no longer whispered behind their hands and hid behind shy glances. They joked and drank, smoked and swore with the boys. Waistlines had slipped, fabrics were thin and morals were thinner.

It may interest the reader to know how they “put horses to” on the continent. The man stands up the horses on each side of the thing that projects from the front end of the wagon, and then throws the tangled mess of gear forward through a ring, and hauls it aft, and passes the other thing through the other ring and hauls it aft on the other side of the other horse, opposite to the first one, after crossing them and bringing the loose end back, and then buckles the other thing underneath the horse, and takes another thing and wraps it around the thing I spoke of before, and puts another thing over each horse’s head, with broad flappers to it to keep the dust out of his eyes, and puts the iron thing in his mouth for him to grit his teeth on, uphill, and brings the ends of these things aft over his back, after buckling another one around under his neck to hold his head up, and hitching another thing on a thing that goes over his shoulders to keep his head up when he is climbing a hill, and then takes the slack of the thing which I mentioned a while ago, and fetches it aft and makes it fast to the thing that pulls the wagon, and hands the other things up to the driver to steer with. I never have buckled up a horse myself, but I do not think we do it that way.

The red haired waitress arrived with their drinks, dancing about the table as she placed their orders in front of them. "Hiya, keeds. Peachy place, ain't it?" Before anyone could respond, she kicked her heels in the air and flitted off again. Waldo lit up a cigarette and tasted his drink. "Listen, I don't think we ought to stay here very long...." "No shit, Sherlock!" Brisbane chortled. "But first I want to have a little fun. I think I'm gonna talk to some of these guys." The fredneck left the table and walked over to a group of five men, all of them clad in the old baseball uniforms that were apparently quite popular at The One Year Wonder And All-Around Oddity Bar. They were huddled together on one side of the bar, and Brisbane broke into their conversation with a burst of fredneck chutzpah.

First to strike a visitor was the raucous music: strident jerking jazz, faster than anything that had gone before; it was the sound of speed. Yet more striking were the dancers: thin young women, diaphanous short skirts showing their legs, their heads crowned with iridescent feathers twitching in time to the music. To those used to Strauss waltzes, these ‘flappers’ seemed to be suffering from some new nervous disorder.

headlines such as ‘Symbols of Shame’, dwelling on the ‘flapper’ scandal, one of the most grievous and piteous of the many social scandals of this tragic time. Do these thoughtless chits, little more than children, realise that the regimental badges they display so exultantly, are in many cases nothing less than symbols of shame, obtained in exchange for more or less dangerous familiarities

If all the smart restaurants were closed down, the ‘flapper’ trade would probably close down also, and the flappers, disdaining the more humble eating-houses they were wont to frequent, may even return to their homes, which they left to imperil, if not to sacrifice, their chastity.

And in a world where individuals felt their vote counted little either in the political arena or the workplace, they could at least demonstrate authority over their own bodies.

Mary agreed with Harry. She had grown fond of Auburn and progressed in school, from second to eleventh grade within four years. Just as important, women in America—with their flapper dresses, lipstick, rouge, and perms—were kicking up their heels, far more liberated than their geta-clopping counterparts in Japan. Having won suffrage in 1920, American women voiced their opinions. Japanese women may have been wearing bolder kimonos, but they were still denied the vote and prevented from living full lives.

Smaller families also created a narrower age gap between first- and last-born children; this trend, in turn, meant that children shared more in common with one another than with their parents.

During the Great Depression, Lysol was the number one form of contraception for women. You read that correctly. Lysol, the number one product for cleaning up elementary school puke, was marketed back then as a feminine hygiene douche for women. “Feminine hygiene” in the early 1930s wasn’t about keeping your flapper hoo-ha fresh and minty; it was woman code for “birth control,” which was illegal.1 So Lysol stepped in and became a woman’s first and only resort to prevent pregnancy.

away from a world where women bobbed their hair and you couldn’t tell who were grandmothers and who were flappers—from behind

There’ll be no more dingy sticks.” “A flapper japper then,” she decided, taking out a charm on a necklace beneath the collar of her bright yellow dress. It looked like a bottle cap with the words flapper japper etched onto it, which was probably because that was exactly what it was. “It only cost me a naked tea party with a leprechaun – and let me tell you, that leprechaun wanted to do a lot more than just have tea.