The Magnificent Ambersons
1918
In the Midwest town where the Ambersons ruled, time moves like honey until it doesn't. George Amberson Minafer - grandson of the magnate who built their empire - is the most insufferable young man in America, a creature of pure entitlement who has never been told no. He rides through life on his family's money and name, blind to everything except his own desires. Then the automobile arrives, and with it a new breed of men: practical, restless, hungry. They build roads where there were lanes, factories where there were fields. George watches his world become unrecognizable, and his desperate attempts to preserve what was always already dying make the fall far more catastrophic than it needed to be. Tarkington wrote this novel in 1918, when America was still processing its own transformation, and he captured something true about how civilizations eat their young.
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“Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.””
— Booth Tarkington
“Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.””
— Booth Tarkington
“Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!””
— Booth Tarkington
“There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!””
— Booth Tarkington
“I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.””
— Booth Tarkington
“No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart.””
— Booth Tarkington
“Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either. ””
— Booth Tarkington
“Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.””
— Booth Tarkington
“...at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this; that's the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.””
— Booth Tarkington
