Frank Crowninshield Quotations

Young men and young women, full of courage, originality, and genius, are everywhere to be met with.

My sense of loneliness was not particularly great until I reached sixty. From that time on, I would have given an ex-king's ransom if I had been able, in my youth to seduce a lady into thinking of me as a handyman and provider around the house.

My interest in society - at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes a little to mind - derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.

Let us instance one respect in which American life has recently undergone a great change. We allude to its increased devotion to pleasure, to happiness, to dancing, to sport... to the delights of the country, to laughter, and to all forms of cheerfulness.

In my day, when you called on a girl, her mother was always hollering down to see if she was still unraped, the maid would look in, her father would shuffle his feet in another room. Today the boy calls up, says, 'Meet you at the back door of Stern's.'

We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America.

For women, we intend to do something in a noble and missionary spirit... We mean to appeal to their intellects... and we hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.

The only perfect climate is bed.

My interest in society - at times so pronounced that the word snob comes a little to mind - derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.

Vanity Fair has but two major articles in its editorial creed: first, to believe in the progress and promise of American life, and, second, to chronicle that progress cheerfully, truthfully, and entertainingly.

... not talking about things she doesn't understand to people who do or about things she does to people who don't.