Amory Quotes & Sayings

I've officially turned into a loser," she whispered cynically. "I'm looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I've had my 'going out and having fun' quota for the year, I guess, and it's June. — Daniel Amory

I will omit but I will not distort. — Cleveland Amory

Don't you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world? asked Connor irrelevantly. — Daniel Amory

This is so funny," said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. "Isn't this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura."
I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura.
"That's better," said Ellen. "Isn't that better? — Daniel Amory

It has long been a theory of mine and I am known, if I do say so, for my long theories that authors, generally speaking, are rotten letter writers. — Cleveland Amory

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his
the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing
he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner ... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A 'good' family, it seems, is one that used to be better. — Cleveland Amory

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life's worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, Law school was over at last! — Daniel Amory

Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was tempermentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Today we have a temporary aberration called "industrial capitalism" which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital, the natural world and properly functioning societies.
No sensible capitalist would do that. — Amory Lovins

There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed."
Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man
a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Support your right to arm bears. — Cleveland Amory

One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping. — Cleveland Amory

Amory: I love you.
Rosalind: I love you- now. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

There are only two ways out for animals at pounds
being adopted or being killed. And cats have such a low rate of adoption that many pounds, even in some larger cities, don't bother to take them in at all. Not for nothing is it always the "dog pound" and never the "cat pound. — Cleveland Amory

The written word is the best thing that mankind has ever done. I'm glad to be a part of it! — Christie Amory

I told the good Father that if he and I were going in the future to some wonderful Elysian Field and the animals were not going to go anywhere, that was all the more reason to give them a little better shake in the one life they did have. — Cleveland Amory

It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class - I mean they're the best-educated men in college - the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on - the Pharisee class - Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name. — Cleveland Amory

It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents. — Cleveland Amory

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? — Amory Lovins

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics". — F Scott Fitzgerald

Rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as, sun, wind and vegetation: on energy income, not depletable energy capital. — Amory Lovins

For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all. — Cleveland Amory

I want to go to Princeton," said Amory. "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes." Monsignor — F Scott Fitzgerald

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food. — F Scott Fitzgerald

If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer.
We find in design it's much more important and difficult to ask the right question.
Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious. — Amory Lovins

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable. — F Scott Fitzgerald

If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. — Amory Lovins

Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants. — Amory Lovins

I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras. — Cleveland Amory

The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion. — Amory Lovins

The facts of life are very stubborn things. — Cleveland Amory

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want
not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable ... 'very few things matter and nothing matters very much — F Scott Fitzgerald

A package of 35 improvements to typical industrial motor systems can save around 50% of their metered energy ... with a simple payback under 16 months. — Amory Lovins

Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize ... that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions. — Cleveland Amory

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. — Amory Lovins

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating
after all, they are women
but they cannot be curmudgeons. — Cleveland Amory

For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it. — Cleveland Amory

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl. — Cleveland Amory

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days? — Cleveland Amory

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.' ...
And what we leave here is more than class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one generation
we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us her to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.' 'That's what they are,' Tom tangented off, 'deep-blue
a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.' Spries, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs
it hurts ... rather
' 'Good-by, Aaron Burr,' Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, 'you and I knew strange corners of life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. — Amory Lovins

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?" asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them.
"Why is it an either or question?" the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought. — Daniel Amory

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are several-fold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so. — Amory Lovins

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... — F Scott Fitzgerald

Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it's all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it's about profit, jobs and competitive advantage. — Amory Lovins

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship-now they don't teach either. — Cleveland Amory

The people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards. — Cleveland Amory

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth. — Daniel Amory

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. — F Scott Fitzgerald

She loves swimming," said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college.
Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.
"Don't you Kara?" asked Ellen.
There was no response.
"I didn't start until I was three," said Ellen. "She's got a two year start on me. — Daniel Amory

The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose. — Cleveland Amory

I don't think I've ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don't think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend."
"How would you introduce her?" I asked.
"I'm just going to say her name," he said. — Daniel Amory

Many analysts now regard modest, zero, or negative growth in our rate of energy use as a realistic long-term goal. — Amory Lovins

The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously. — Amory Lovins

Many business leaders are asking fundamental questions about what business they're in, why they are doing it and how it can be used as a means of healing human and natural communities. — Amory Lovins

Killed so tragically in a plane crash, in a plane he was flying himself; David Amory, her grandfather, who was aboard that plane, — Barbara Taylor Bradford

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat. — Cleveland Amory

Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. — Amory Lovins

Look, girls know when they're cute," he said. "You don't have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn't have a job. I was like, 'How are you going to get a job there in this market?' And she's like, 'I'll wink and I'll smile.' She's a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen. — Daniel Amory

I have read a great deal about what animals dream, but none of it has ever really satisfied me. I believe they dream exactly the way we dream, and about everything in their lives
that they have good dreams and bad dreams in almost direct proportion, as we do, to whether their lives have been more good than bad. Unfortunately, because the majority of animals have it so much tougher than we do, I believe that the majority of dreams, except in the most fortunate petdom, are bad. — Cleveland Amory

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. — Cleveland Amory

Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: And Amory will have no other adventure like me. — F Scott Fitzgerald

That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street's burn. — Daniel Amory

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. — Daniel Amory

I'm not an environmentalist. I'm a cultural repairman. It's all about efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, prosperous and life-sustaining. — Amory Lovins

Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource. — Amory Lovins

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally - the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Prominent exploration experts have recently predicted that total world production of liquid oil will peak by about the end of this decade-or a few years later if production does not rise much-and will decline thereafter. — Amory Lovins

I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors. — Cleveland Amory

I can't take a well-tanned person seriously. — Cleveland Amory

I think along the way, as we treat nature as model and mentor, and not as a nuisance to be evaded or manipulated, we will certainly acquire much more reverence for life than we seem to be showing right now. — Amory Lovins

Looking in those eyes I had grown to like so well - the eyes I trusted implicitly but could make my stomach writhe with pleasure - I felt a twinge of sadness that there was nothing in the future to suggest we might ever be a normal couple.

"If we don't make it out alive -"

His shook his head once. "We will."

I continued, more quickly this time. "If we don't -"

"Especially if we don't," he finished, pulling me into him. My lips met his - this time unsurprised. This time, I wanted it desperately. — Tarah Benner

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30. — Cleveland Amory

You can give of your talent, you can give of your possessions, or you can give of yourself. For God's sake, give something. — Cleveland Amory

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them. — Amory Lovins

For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the cold slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it," he said, his glasses flashing from the early night's light.
He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.
"You know what I mean, Tom?" he asked. "It's just not. — Daniel Amory

Oh, it isn't that I mind the glittering caste system," admitted Amory. "I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I've got to be one of them. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw. — F Scott Fitzgerald

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. 'What's the point?' he said. 'Kids aren't getting jobs.' You never hear faculty talk that way. He did. — Daniel Amory

We'd find more energy in the attics of American homes (through energy conservation measures) than in all the oil buried in Alaska. — Amory Lovins

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?" asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air.
My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, "Disgusting cardboard it is! — Daniel Amory

The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you're a customer today, you're an intruder. — Cleveland Amory

I'm a practitioner of elegant frugality. I don't feel comfortable telling other people what to do, so I just try and lead by example. — Amory Lovins

Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Really, nobody was there?" I asked.
"Well, nobody important," he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking. — Daniel Amory