Janet Flanner Quotations

She was built for crowds. She has never come any closer to life than the dinner table.

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.

... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

Never have nights been more beautiful than these nights of anxiety. In the sky have been shining in trinity the moon, Venus and Mars. Nature has been more splendid than man.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.