Quotes & Sayings About Flappers

What's really interesting is when you get a brand-new wave that has no connection to anything else. It always reflects society. The flappers would cut the dresses and make them looser, they smoked, their hair was short. It was a rebellion against the corset and the Edwardian era. — Annie Lennox

brought home half a dozen flappers, killed with the rifle if I had been out after large game, or with the revolver if I had merely been among the cattle, - each duck, in the latter case, representing the expenditure of a vast number of cartridges. — Theodore Roosevelt

Flappers sounds like where waitresses go after they're too old to work at Hooters. — Ray Romano

Scott had learned much about girls when he was courting Zelda: the paradoxical mix of dependency and disdain she felt for her own beauty, the small tragedies and triumphs of her teenage life. In transferring these nuances to Rosalind, he became one of the first writers in post-war America to evoke a complex, modern heroine. — Judith Mackrell

And when the mood took her to fall for the handsome young lawyer Will Bankhead, she happily threw over the man to whom she was already engaged. — Judith Mackrell

EFFERVESCENCE AND EVANESCENCE

We've found this Scott Fitzgerald chap
A chipper charming child;
He's taught us how the flappers flap,
And why the whipper-snappers snap,
What makes the women wild.
But now he should make haste to trap
The ducats in his dipper.
The birds that put him on the map
Will shortly all begin to rap
And flop to something flipper. — Keith Preston

Right away I fell in love with him because he was so good looking. And because he was alone with ten women around him — Judith Mackrell

You could make people love you, she discovered, by keeping them entertained. — Judith Mackrell

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible. — Charles Darwin

I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars. — Laura Moriarty

College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain. — Nell Zink

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight. — John Dos Passos