Hervey Allen Quotes

Mornings, the flower-women hawk their wares— </br> Bronze caryatids of a genial race, </br> Bearing the bloom-heaped baskets on their heads.

Practise...what I call a decent mammalian philosophy.

A victory for any side is a defeat for every side now.

What is even a wise book but a blast from the lungs made visible to the eyes?

Southward, two mighty ranges of the Appalachians shouldered their way into the blue distance like tremendous caravans marching across eternity.

A great longing for that happy, waltzing, music-box time came over him.

Religions change; beer and wine remain.

Every new generation...is a fresh invasion of savages.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

Grow up as soon as you can. It pays. The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty, provided of course you are healthy and don’t die. No, the young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

He regarded all the country he was looking at as still a part of the United States, some of the inhabitants of which needed to be reconverted to the faith of their fathers—by apostolic blows and knocks if necessary.

This Appalachian country was not huge, barren, and monotonous like so much of the West. There was nothing here to suggest that perhaps one had always better be moving. On the contrary, there was a kind of overtone from the countryside that whispered, "Tarry, traveller, tarry. Here is comfort for the soul of man. Here are verdancy and peace."

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

I lay there in the river for a minute and gave up. When you do that something dies inside.

Between the villages of Aubière and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation.