Louis Auchincloss Quotes - Page 2

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• You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Children, School, Emotional

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• Decent artists go through bad times but eventually they do get recognized. It's by no means a battle lost. Yet.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Mean, Artist, Battle

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• I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Character, Mean, Writing

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• A common objection to inherited wealth is that it stifles the urge to work. I have not generally observed this to be true.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Common, Wealth, Being True

  Louis Auchincloss (2010). “A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The crowd has a way of being right.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Crowds, Way

  Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.335, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country...with hope and delight.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Country, Grace, Delight

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• As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Class, Together, Fascination

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• Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Love, Boys, Men

  Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Reading, Yale, Rome

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• 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.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Gratitude, Fate, Dying

  Louis Auchincloss (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I couldn't bear to see a chapter of the gospel turned into a chapter of Trollope.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Bears, Chapters

  Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Art, Renaissance, Awful

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• Consider, children ... the pain of touching the tip of your finger to your mother's stove, even for a fraction of a second. That is an experience which most of you have suffered. Now try to imagine that pain, not simply on a fingertip but spread over the whole surface of your body, and not for a mere second, but everlastingly. That, children, is hellfire.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Mother, Pain, Children

  Louis Auchincloss (1965). “The Rector of Justin”

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• There's no real alternative to what there is.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Real, Alternatives

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• Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Religious, Art, Passionate

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