Gilbert Parker Quotes

There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.

Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars —Gilbert Parker

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

It's the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who are clever never think of trying to be.

Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars.

He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.

She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute, and that good is often an occasion more than a condition.

The real business of life is trying to understand each other.

There is no influence like the influence of habit.

There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.

There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do. There's no virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to work - or worry.

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

Ever since I’d met Edna Parker Watson, I tried to wear suits whenever possible. Among other lessons, that woman had taught me that a suit will always make you look more chic and important than a dress. And not too much jewelry! “A majority of the time,” Edna said, “jewelry is an attempt to cover up a badly chosen or ill-fitting garment.

Bow was originally billed as the “Brooklyn Bonfire,” then as the “Hottest Jazz Baby in Films,” but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the “It Girl.” “It” was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating (“she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent”) and for being the mistress for some years of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. “It,” as Glyn explained, “is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man.” Asked by a reporter to name some notable possessors of “It,” Glyn cited Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert, and Rex the Wonder Horse. Later she extended the list to include the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It the novel was a story in which the two principal characters—Ava and Larry, both dripping with “It”—look at each other with “burning eyes” and “a fierce gleam” before getting together to “vibrate with passion.” As Dorothy Parker summed up the book in The New Yorker, “It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam-launches.

It is well worth seeing City of Girls, if only to enjoy Edna Parker Watson’s costumes—which are delectable, from stem to stern.