John P. Marquand

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 – July 16, 1960) was an American writer. Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories (starting with Your Turn, Mr. Moto in 1935), he achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining nature of life in America's upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of respect and satire.

Quotes

The Late George Apley (1937)

• It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.
  • Ch. 3

• If George Apley failed to meet certain challenges, let us admit that we all have failed in some respects, and let us remember that we stand together peculiarly as one large family. Collectively, in habits and ideals, our group is a family group where kinship, however distant, stretches into the oddest corners.
  • Ch. 5

• Some day you will know that there is a beauty of the soul that is more important than worldly beauty. Remember this when you see worldly beauty.
  • Ch. 7

• Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than to the intellect. Hard reading exercises the mind.
  • Ch. 7

• I wonder whether you know exactly what marriage means. It is, my boy, a damnably serious business, particularly around Boston.
  • Ch. 11

• The mood is on me to-night only because I have listened to several hours of intelligent conversation and I am not a very brilliant person. Sometimes here on Pequod Island and back again on Beacon Street, I have the most curious delusion that our world may be a little narrow. I cannot avoid the impression that something has gone out of it (what, I do not know), and that our little world moves in an orbit of its own, again one of those confounded circles, or possibly an ellipse. Do you suppose that it moves without any relation to anything else? That it is broken off from some greater planet like the moon? We talk of life, we talk of art, but do we actually know anything about either? Have any of us really lived? Sometimes I am not entirely sure; sometimes I am afraid that we are all amazing people, placed in an ancestral mould. There is no spring, there is no force. Of course you know better than this, you who plunge every day in the operating room of the Massachusetts General, into life itself. Come up here and tell me I am wrong.
  • Ch. 15

• To any rightly thinking person, . . . there can be no compromise between wrong and right. Germany is wrong and the Allies are right. The devastations of Belgium and the atrocities of the invading horde of barbarians are an outrage to civilized mankind.
  • Ch. 20

• Most people in the world don’t know who the Apleys are and they don’t give a damn. I don’t intend this as rudeness but as a sort of comfort. I know it has been a comfort to me sometimes when talking with your aunt. Just remember that most people don’t give a damn. When you remember it, you won’t feel the necessity of taking the Apleys so seriously.
  • Ch. 21

• There is a certain phase in the life of the aged when the warmth of the heart seems to increase in direct proportion with the years. This is a time of life when a solicitous family does well to watch affectionately over the vagaries of its unattached relatives, particularly of those who are comfortably off.
  • Ch. 23

• Nothing which is worth while is easy, nor in my experience is the actual doing of it particularly pleasant. The pleasure arises from completion and from the knowledge that one has done the right thing and has stood by one’s convictions.
  • Ch. 26

• This material change has made you all materialists, and yet it has rendered your grasp on reality uncertain. It has made you rely on the material gratification of the senses. It has made you worship Mammon and in this new material world everything comes too easily. Heat comes too easily and cold. Money comes too easily. Don’t forget that it will go as easily too. Romance comes too easily, and success. We have all grown soft from this ease. Position changes too easily. Values shift elusively. When everything is totalled up we have evolved a fine variety of flushing toilets but not a very good world.
  • Ch. 29

External links

• Encyclopedic article on John P. Marquand on Wikipedia