Gilded Age New York Quotes & Sayings

The poor serve the elite, and they have too much fear to stop. So the poor get poorer, and the elite stay safe and powerful. — Chelsie Shock

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed. — Louis Auchincloss

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

Love was like a stock, Lizzie realized. You gambled on its paying off in the long run - but it could just as easily cost you everything. — Joanna Shupe

There's incredible effect in being either loved or hated, but knowing that, either way, you have penetrated the mind and have altered it; that is a very pleasurable feeling. — Nicolas Winding Refn

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life
a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it
filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction ... — Louis Auchincloss

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

I've always felt comfortable amongst the horrors. I married your uncle Gerard, after all. — Melika Dannese Lux

Love your haters - they're your biggest fans — Kanye West

She can go places we cannot, associate with people we cannot, understand things about society types and women that we never can. (Why Mr. Burke hires Violet Strange.) — Candida Martinelli

One of the most subtle and powerful writers of dark fiction - a unique voice. — Michael Marshall Smith

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different. — Sam Kean

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others. — Howard Zinn

Setting that little girl loose in her society would be like putting a fox in with the chickens. (Violet Strange's detective boss.) — Candida Martinelli

It's bullshit. It's so easy to label people, to look at a list of symptoms and say, This is who you are. This is what you are. — Elizabeth Scott