16 quotes
A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
...it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
...girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school’s quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
[IRENE ROSENBAUM:] ...“you Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause”...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans — but every pearl has its oyster."
Pictures from an Institution (1954)