Quotes from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“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

“Hinton spent most of his adult years trying to visualize higher spatial dimensions. He had no interest in finding a physical interpretation for the fourth dimension. Einstein saw, however, that the fourth dimension can be taken as a temporal one. He was guided by a conviction and physical intuition that higher dimensions have a purpose: to unify the principles of nature. By adding higher dimensions, he could unite physical concepts that, in a three-dimensional world, have no connection, such as matter and energy.”
― Michio Kaku, quote from Hyperspace

“You’re Rowe Stanton, a freshman from Arizona, and you’re here with honors. You haven’t picked a major yet, though I can tell from the small things you said during our walk over here that you really like art. You should think about that. You used to play tennis, and I bet you could still kick my ass, and you don’t wear socks with your sneakers. I like that. It’s hot.”
― Ginger Scott, quote from This is Falling

“زندگی میں انسان کو ایک عادت ضرور سیکھ لینی چاہیے جو چیز ہاتھ سے نکل جائے اسے بھول جانے کی عادت. یہ عادت بہت سی تکلیفوں سے بچا دیتی ہے.”
― Umera Ahmed, quote from امربیل (Amar Bail)

“They shake hands—the solid, down-to-earth man and the restless, unpredictable lightning in the sky. I feel like a tree exposed to the elements, my roots clinging to the soil, my branches flirting with heaven.”
― Leylah Attar, quote from 53 Letters for My Lover

“Désormais, sous prétexte de laïcité, tous les discours se valent : l’erreur et la vérité, le faux et le vrai, le fantasque et le sérieux. Le mythe et la fable pèsent autant que la raison. La magie compte autant que la science. Le rêve autant que la réalité. Or tous les discours ne se valent pas : ceux de la névrose, de l’hystérie et du mysticisme procèdent d’un autre monde que celui du positiviste. Pas plus qu’on ne doit renvoyer dos à dos bourreau et victime, bien et mal, on ne doit tolérer la neutralité, la bienveillance affichée pour la totalité des régimes de discours, y compris ceux des pensées magiques. Faut-il rester neutre ? Doit-on rester neutre ? A-t-on encore les moyens de ce luxe ? Je ne crois pas...”
― Michel Onfray, quote from Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

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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.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.