The Magnificent Ambersons quotes

Major Amberson had “made a fortune” in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.

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.

to save, even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline. No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either upon “art,” or upon mere luxury and entertainment, without a sense of sin.

Against so homespun a background the magnificence of the Ambersons was as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral.

Major Amberson bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue; and through this tract he built broad streets and cross-streets; paved them with cedar block, and curbed them with stone.

One citizen, having thus discoursed to a visitor, came to a thoughtful pause, and then added, “Does seem pretty much like squandering, yet when you see that dog out walking with this Miss Isabel, he seems worth the money.”

“Well, sir,” said the citizen, “she’s not more than just about eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, and I don’t know as I know just how to put it⁠—but she’s kind of a delightful lookin’ young lady!”

“What! Why, we saw you, right in the middle of the fourth row!”

“Yes,” she said, smiling, “but I was sitting just behind Isabel Amberson. I couldn’t look at anything except her wavy brown hair and the wonderful back of her neck.”

The ineligible young men of the town (they were all ineligible) were unable to content themselves with the view that had so charmed Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster: they spent their time struggling to keep Miss Amberson’s face turned toward them.

“By golly, I guess you think you own this town!” an embittered labourer complained, one day, as Georgie rode the pony straight through a pile of sand the man was sieving.

“I will when I grow up,” the undisturbed child replied. “I guess my grandpa owns it now, you bet!”

And the baffled workman, having no means to controvert what seemed a mere exaggeration of the facts, could only mutter, “Oh, pull down your vest!”

“I will when I grow up,” the undisturbed child replied. “I guess my grandpa owns it now, you bet!” And the baffled workman, having no means to controvert what seemed a mere exaggeration of the facts, could only mutter, “Oh, pull down your vest!”

“Don’t haf to! Doctor says it ain’t healthy!” the boy returned promptly. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll pull down my vest if you’ll wipe off your chin!”

This was stock and stencil: the accustomed argot of street badinage of the period; and in such matters Georgie was an expert. He had no vest to pull down;

“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t got any sister!”

“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s in jail.”

“I dare you to get down off that pony!”

And it was tonight, while he stood with her, “receiving,” that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this stranger whom he thus fleetingly encountered for the first time.

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. Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers;

neither had said anything in which the other had discovered the slightest intrinsic interest; there had not arisen between them the beginnings of congeniality, or even of friendliness—but stairways near ballrooms have more to answer for than have moonlit lakes and mountain sunsets.

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.

Age, confused by its own long accumulation of follies, is everlastingly inquiring, “What does she see in him?” as if young love came about through thinking—or through conduct. Age wants to know: “What on earth can they talk about?”

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.

Age, confused by its own long accumulation of follies, is everlastingly inquiring, “What does she see in him?” as if young love came about through thinking⁠—or through conduct.

Age wants to know: “What on earth can they talk about?” as if talking had anything to do with April rains! At seventy, one gets up in the morning, finds the air sweet under a bright sun, feels lively;

as if young love came about through thinking—or through conduct. Age wants to know: “What on earth can they talk about?” as if talking had anything to do with April rains!

At seventy, one gets up in the morning, finds the air sweet under a bright sun, feels lively; thinks, “I am hearty, today,” and plans to go for a drive. At eighteen, one goes to a dance, sits with a stranger on a stairway, feels peculiar, thinks nothing, and becomes incapable of any plan whatever.

Miss Morgan and George stayed where they were.

“What do you want to be?” she asked.

“A yachtsman,” he said.

“Nobody could make fun of him,” she said quietly.

“It wouldn’t make him funny: it would only make themselves silly.”

Upon this, George had a gleam of intelligence. “Well, I’m not going to make myself silly any more, then; I don’t want to take chances like that with you. But I thought he was the Sharon girls’ uncle. He came with them—”

“My Lord!” Kinney groaned, half in earnest. “Old times starting all over again! My Lord!”

“Old times?” Morgan laughed gaily from the doorway. “Not a bit! 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!”

And he vanished in such a manner that he seemed already to have begun dancing.

No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people.

Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart

; and Lucy gave her companion a little sidelong, sunny nod of acknowledgment. George was dazzled by the quick glow of her eyes, and found himself at a loss for something to say.

Miss Fanny Minafer herself told me that everything George and his mother have of their own—that is, just to spend as they like—she says it has always come from Major Amberson.”

“Thrift, Horatio!” said Eugene lightly.

“Thrift’s an inheritance, and a common enough one here.

George Amberson and Fanny were both “wiped out to a miracle of precision,” as Amberson said. They “owned not a penny and owed not a penny,” he continued, explaining his phrase.

“It’s like the moment just before drowning: you’re not under water and you’re not out of it. All you know is that you’re not dead yet.”

He spoke philosophically, having his “prospects” from his father to fall back upon; but Fanny had neither “prospects” nor philosophy. However, a legal survey of Wilbur’s estate revealed the fact that his life insurance was left clear of the wreck;

“Oh, yes,” he said.

“Life’s most ingenious: it’s got a special walloping for every mother’s son of ’em!”

“Maybe,” said Isabel, troubled—“maybe some of the mothers can take the walloping for them.”

“I’ll tell you what puts the lines there,” Eugene said.

“Age puts some, and trouble puts some, and work puts some, but the deepest are carved by lack of faith. The serenest brow is the one that believes the most.”

“In what?” Isabel asked gently.

“Several hundred proprietors today,” Eugene suggested.

“No; they’re only proprietors of the university,” said George’s uncle. “We’re looking for the proprietor of the universe.”

“There he is!” cried Isabel fondly, not minding this satire at all. “And doesn’t he look it!”

Her cordial smile was tempered now with good-nature. “George!” She laughed indulgently.

“Surely you don’t want me to do pathos on a downtown corner!”

“You wouldn’t ‘do pathos’ anywhere!”

She shook the picture out of her eyes indignantly, then came and sat before her fire, and looked long and long at the blackened mantelpiece. She did not have the mantelpiece repainted—and, since she did not, might as well have kept his photographs.

One forgets what made the scar upon his hand but not what made the scar upon his wall.

She played no marche funèbre upon her piano, even though Chopin’s romantic lamentation was then at the top of nine-tenths of the music-racks in the country, American youth having recently discovered the distinguished congeniality between itself and this deathless bit of deathly gloom.

and poured soot on them. They boasted of their schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the children or their mothers. It was the fault of the idealists, who said:

“The more dirt, the more prosperity.”

They drew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs. “Boost! Don’t knock!” they said.

They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as the first step toward becoming free men) until they should make the strange and hard discovery that matter should serve man’s spirit.

“Prosperity” meant good credit at the bank, black lungs, and housewives’ Purgatory.

The women fought the dirt all they could; but if they let the air into their houses they let in the dirt. It shortened their lives, and kept them from the happiness of ever seeing anything white.

“In God’s name, what else could I have done?” For his mother’s immutable silence was surely answering him as Isabel in life would never have answered him, and he was beginning to understand how eloquent the dead can be.

They cannot stop their eloquence, no matter how they have loved the living: they cannot choose.

And so, no matter in what agony George should cry out, “What else could I have done?” and to the end of his life no matter how often he made that wild appeal, Isabel was doomed to answer him with the wistful, faint murmur:

Altogether gallant in spirit, and beautifully game under catastrophe, he had gone into a great many, and the unanimity of their “bad luck,” as he called it, gave him one claim to be a distinguished person, if he had no other.

In business he was ill fated with a consistency which made him, in that alone, a remarkable man

; and he declared, with some earnestness, that there was no accounting for it except by the fact that there had been so much good luck in his family before he was born that something had to balance it.

When the great Amberson Estate went into court for settlement, “there wasn’t any,” George Amberson said—that is, when the settlement was concluded there was no estate. “I guessed it,” Amberson went on. “

As an expert on prosperity, my career is disreputable, but as a prophet of calamity I deserve a testimonial banquet.

” He reproached himself bitterly for not having long ago discovered that his father had never given Isabel a deed to her house. “And those pigs, Sydney and Amelia!” he added, for this was another thing he was bitter about. “They won’t do anything.

If she ever thinks of me she probably imagines I’m still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion, and she probably thinks of the Mansion as still beautiful—still the finest house in town.

Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks.

And when they’re gone we can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em!

in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime.

He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile.

This was a fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in dress.

Tomorrow they were to “move out,” and George was to begin his work in Bronson’s office. He had not come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on.

For of all the “ideals of life” which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money.

George Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken shrewdly when he realized at last that money, like life, was “like quicksilver in a nest of cracks.”

“All right,” he said. “If you’ll promise not to get blown up, I’ll go with you to see if we can find the job.” Then, meaning what he said, but amazed that he did mean it, he added:

“You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met!”

He had got it three times filled and running over. The city had rolled over his heart, burying it under, as it rolled over the Major’s and buried it under.

The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them under to the last vestige

;

“Quicksilver in a nest of cracks!”

Georgie Minafer had got his comeuppance, but the people who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it.

Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.

… its bridge, its variable alliances and shifting feuds, and the long whisperings of elderly ladies at corridor corners—those eager but suppressed conversations, all sibilance, of which the elevator boy declared he heard the words “she said” a million times and the word “she,” five million.

The apartment house suited Fanny and swallowed her.

The city was so big, now, that people disappeared into it unnoticed, and the disappearance of Fanny and her nephew was not exceptional. People no longer knew their neighbours as a matter of course;

… However, the nitroglycerin expert of whom they spoke did not get into the papers as a consequence of being blown up, although his daily life was certainly a continuous exposure to that risk.

Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous

, and it was George’s lot to manipulate wholesale quantities of terrific and volatile explosives in safety, and to be laid low by an accident so commonplace and inconsequent that it was a comedy.