Quotes from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“For the Vanderbilts lived in a day when flaunting one’s money was not only accepted but celebrated. What may have started as playacting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress balls in fairytale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed the new American nobility.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“GENTLEMEN You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. C. Vanderbilt”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”62”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“A dinner invitation once accepted is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

“In the hidden reaches where memory probes lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

Popular quotes

“heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease—in the pleasure and power of turning someone on—that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

“Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.”
― Nora Ephron, quote from I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“كن رحيما في العقاب لئلا يهلك ولا تهمله فيمعن في الشر”
― quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Nobody goes through life without having their heart broken and one day you'll wake up and it will be okay.”
― quote from It

“Hell = "where we get rid of all the lies told to us. That’s where we go and cry like rain. Mom, hell is where you go to see yourself.”
― Ana Castillo, quote from So Far from God

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