Hervey Allen

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

"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."

"Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void."

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

"Christ Jesus, when I come to die Grant me a clean, sweet, summer sky, Without the mad wind's panther cry. Send me a little garden breeze To gossip in magnolia trees; For I have heard, these fifty years, Confessions muttered at my ears, Till every mumble of the wind Is like tired voices that have sinned."

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

"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."

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

"Religions change; beer and wine remain."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday—tapped the feet of the mare."

"It is only men of genuine philosophical sense who can understand that the form of government is the most important thing in the world."

"It was good to be alive. Black Girl gathered herself under him and thundered down the Pike towards Lancaster. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—was the tune her hoofs now seemed to be drumming on the road away from yesterday."

"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.""

"If there was anything "new and better" about America it was the hope of peace—of peace on a more secure, vaster, continental scale than had ever been tried or attempted before. Oceans to the east and west of her, arid wilderness to the south, and the self-same friendly people to the north—the nation could not be seriously threatened by anything but disturbance from within."

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