50 Quotes About 1920s

We don’t seize the moment, there’ll be another foreign skirmish or some American flying a hot air balloon to the moon or someplace...

It’s very much its own reward, I find, spending other people’s money.

It’ll be just like Romeo and Juliet,” I said, “without the emotive poetry of a suicide pact —

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humour crawled into corners to sleep;

They were smart and sophisticated, with an air of independence about them, and so casual about their looks and clothes and manners as to be almost slapdash. I don't know if I realized as soon as I began seeing them that they represented the wave of the future, but I do know I was drawn to them. I shared their restlessness, understood their determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre-World War I era and find out for themselves what life was all about.

(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.

She's a self-conscious vampire ... and she goes about using sex as a sort of shrimping net.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.