Quotes from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

288 pages

Rating: (2.3K votes)


“The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“Instead of getting the house like Mount Vernon, they had moved into the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, and Betsy had become pregnant, and he had thrown the vase against the wall, and the washing machine had broken down. And Grandmother had died and left her house to somebody, and instead of being made vice-president of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, he had finally arrived at a job where he tested mattresses, was uneasy when his boss said he wanted to see him without explaining why, and lived in fear of an elevator operator.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who'll say anything for pay.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness – they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“Believe me, I want you to have a good time,' he said gently, 'but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit



“I could get a job in an advertising agency. I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“It doesn't really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit


“A birth usually has more consequences than a death.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit



Popular quotes

“What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Last of the Wine


“It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust


“Whoever has gratitude will be given more, and he or she will have an abundance. Whoever does not have gratitude, even what he or she has will be taken from him or her.”
― Rhonda Byrne, quote from The Magic


“I don't know, I can't quite get it."
"Don't try. It's just words."
"Just words?"
"Just words! We love them so much, you and me. But in the end, they fail us. Because there are truths beyond words.”
― Aidan Chambers, quote from This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn


“You do anything for the person you love,” she said finally. "And then when you don’t think you can give any more of yourself, you do. You keep going. Because it would kill you not to.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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