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

“He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish


“Lord help the female population if Kellan and I have a boy one day.”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Reckless


“The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City


“You want what you can’t have. I see it in your eyes. The pain that fills your nights is because of my pack of lies. I’ve opened up the door for you
to walk away. There’s a better path for you even though I want you to stay. I’ve broken the rules, I’ve veered from the path but when I met you I
knew to save you was worth the wrath. Let me leave now before it’s too late. Let me leave now before you know what I am and your love becomes
hate.
Walk away from me before I break down and take you with me. You can’t go where I’m going you can’t walk through my Hell. Walk away from me
before I break down and take you with me. My path is meant for only me. There is no way to take you too. I’ve given you life when it was in my
hands to give you death. Walk away from me.
112
Existence
I watch the life I know you will lead without me here. It’s what you deserve it is where you belong it is everything I want but everything I fear. Once I
met you I knew I had to save you but you saved me. Now I’m turning away and letting you run free. Not one moment will I forget there is a fire
inside me that you lit with your touch. Hurting you wasn’t the plan but it must happen by my hand.
Walk away from me before I break down and take you with me. You can’t go where I’m going you can’t walk through my Hell. Walk away from me
before I break down and take you with me. My path is meant for only me. There is no way to take you too. I’ve given you life when it was in my
hands to give you death. Walk away from me.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Existence


“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Beyond Good and Evil


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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.

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