Top 40 Booth Tarkington Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is love in old age, no longer blind, that is true love. For the love’s highest intensity doesn’t necessarily mean it’s highest quality.”

— Booth Tarkington

2. “Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.”

— Booth Tarkington

3. “The Major’s wife and the daughter’s been to Europe, and my wife tells me since they got back they make tea there every afternoon about five o’clock, and drink it. Seems to me it would go against a person’s stomach, just before supper like that, and anyway tea isn’t fit for much – not unless you’re sick or something.”

— Booth Tarkington

4. “An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.”

— Booth Tarkington

5. “Christmas day is the children’s, but the holidays are youth’s dancing-time.”

— Booth Tarkington

6. “Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.”

— Booth Tarkington

7. “There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.”

— Booth Tarkington

8. “Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either.”

— Booth Tarkington

9. “The things that we have and that we think are so solid – they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into, nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.”

— Booth Tarkington

10. “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

11. “Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.”

— Booth Tarkington

12. “They were upon their great theme: “When I get to be a man!” Being human, though boys, they considered their present estate too commonplace to be dwelt upon. So, when the old men gather, they say: “When I was a boy!” It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover.”

— Booth Tarkington

13. “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

14. “Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous.”

— Booth Tarkington

15. “Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.”

— Booth Tarkington

16. “The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.”

— Booth Tarkington

17. “The understanding smile of an old wife to her husband is one of the loveliest things in the world.”

— Booth Tarkington

18. “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

19. “Gossip is never fatal until it is denied.”

— Booth Tarkington

20. “Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can’t get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain.”

— Booth Tarkington

21. “Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.”

— Booth Tarkington

22. “I always thought that explained it: the romance is a reaction from the algebra. I never knew a person connected with mathematics or astronomy or statistics, or any of those exact things, who didn’t have a crazy streak in ’em SOMEwhere.”

— Booth Tarkington

23. “Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged lovers are a joke – not a very funny one.”

— Booth Tarkington

24. “One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.”

— Booth Tarkington

25. “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

26. “It is the liveliest time in life, the happiest of the irresponsible times in life. Mothers echo its happiness – nothing is like a mother who has a son home from college, except another mother with a son home from college. Bloom does actually come upon these mothers; it is a visible thing; and they run like girls, walk like athletes, laugh like sycophants. Yet they give up their sons to the daughters of other mothers, and find it proud rapture enough to be allowed to sit and watch.”

— Booth Tarkington

27. “Is this life?‘Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. ‘Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren’t so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to?”

— Booth Tarkington

28. “Got ’ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother know you’re out?”

— Booth Tarkington

29. “Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent.”

— Booth Tarkington

30. “So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.”

— Booth Tarkington

31. “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

32. “It was annoying how her voice, though never loud, pursued him. No matter how vociferous were other voices, all about, he seemed unable to prevent himself from constantly recognizing hers.”

— Booth Tarkington

33. “So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard,‘Engaged’. She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon tables marked ‘Reserved”: the glance, slightly discontented, passes on at once.”

— Booth Tarkington

34. “Nothing stays or holds or keeps where there is growth, he somehow perceived vaguely but truly. Great Caesar dead and turned to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away. Dead Caesar was nothing but a tiresome bit of print in a book that schoolboys study for awhile and then forget. The Ambersons had passed, and the new people would pass, and the new people that came after them, and then the next new ones, and the next – and the next –.”

— Booth Tarkington

35. “This is a boy’s lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime – he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.”

— Booth Tarkington

36. “Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their.”

— Booth Tarkington

37. “My wife says Ambersons don’t make lettuce salad the way other people do; they don’t chop it up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar, and they have it separate – not along with the rest of the meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she’s going to buy some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like ’em, she says.”

— Booth Tarkington

38. “Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.”

— Booth Tarkington

Featured in: Romance Quotes

39. “The only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her – especially if that is what she desires.”

— Booth Tarkington

40. “In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones – another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure – they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady!”

— Booth Tarkington

41. “Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.”

— Booth Tarkington

42. “In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.”

— Booth Tarkington