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Roaring Twenties Quotes

Browse 17 quotes about Roaring Twenties.

Roaring Twenties Quotes

“Girls had changed. They had liberated themselves from their corsets only to throw themselves at the tyranny of the "diet plan." They were all coltish legs, bound chests and smooth scalps. They no longer whispered behind their hands and hid behind shy glances. They joked and drank, smoked and swore with the boys. Waistlines had slipped, fabrics were thin and morals were thinner.”

“Gentlemen and ladies- in green, yellow, pink- arriving on the terrace, sweeping down the stone stairs onto the lawn. Jazz music floating on the air; Chinese lanterns flickering in the breeze; Mr. Hamilton's hired waiters balancing huge silver trays of sparkling champagne flutes on raised hands, weaving through the growing crowds; Emmeline, shimmering in pink, leading a laughing fellow to the dance floor to perform the Shimmy shake.”

“Above all, wealth was no longer to be flaunted. While an ostentatious displays of money might have been de rigueur in the Golden Twenties, it was decidedly out of fashion in the desperate days of the Destitute Thirties. The splashy parties the socialite once gave and attended in the twenties in New York and Palm Beach now dwindled to a trickle and were replaced with charity teas, and fund raisers.”

“Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party's "Roaring Twenties" theme- chosen to commemorate the end of Kat's own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook- a wizened Malay man who'd brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan.”

“It was 1924 and I was at Riverton again. All the doors hung wide open, silk billowing in the summer breeze. An orchestra perched high on the hill beneath the ancient maple, violins lilting lazily in the warmth. The air rang with pealing laughter and crystal, and the sky was the kind of blue we'd all thought the war had destroyed forever. One of the footmen, smart in black and white, poured champagne into the top of a tower of glass flutes and everyone clapped, delighting in the splendid wastage. I saw myself, the way one does in dreams, moving amongst the guests. Moving slowly, much more slowly than one can in life, the others a blur of silk and sequins. I was looking for someone.”

“Jazz as Herman has come to it is part of the big come-on. Get ‘em in and get ‘em loaded. Get ‘em loaded and get ‘em laid. Get ‘em laid and get ‘em out. And all the while the band made noise, laid down the beat. When you got laid, you jazzed your girl, but you didn’t want to the hit the street with jazz still on our pants… and, what the hell, jazz is jazz… and the dance floor and the tables, too, completely filled and the temperature going up and up, the faces of the dancers shining with sweat and excitement. Because they’ve surrendered as well, all of them, the booze beginning to take hold, its toxic contents roaring through their veins, mounting into the heads topped with brilliantined hair or bobbed, the girls’ cheeks flushed like rose petals and the flush creeping down their swanlike necks, past the strings of paste that for tonight are agreed to be the real thing.”

“Jazz as Herman has come to know it is part of the big come-on. Get ‘em in and get ‘em loaded. Get ‘em loaded and get ‘em laid. Get ‘em laid and get ‘em out. And all the while the band made noise, laid down the beat. When you got laid, you jazzed your girl, but you didn’t want to the hit the street with jazz still on our pants… and, what the hell, jazz is jazz… and the dance floor and the tables, too, completely filled and the temperature going up and up, the faces of the dancers shining with sweat and excitement. Because they’ve surrendered as well, all of them, the booze beginning to take hold, its toxic contents roaring through their veins, mounting into the heads topped with brilliantined hair or bobbed, the girls’ cheeks flushed like rose petals and the flush creeping down their swanlike necks, past the strings of paste that for tonight are agreed to be the real thing.”

“Michael Bohn provides a rare opportunity to experience the American sporting scene in the Roaring Twenties. A constant stream of legendary characters marches across these pages. You’ll meet them all: The Babe, The Four Horsemen, The Manassa Manassas Mauler, The Wheaton Iceman, Bill Tilden, Gertrude Ederle, and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter whose purple prose made them all come alive.”

“In the early years of the Roaring Twenties, American women not only won the right to vote but they also earned headlines along side their male counterparts during the Golden Age of American sports. Michael Bohn shares an engaging story of how two sports heroines, tennis player Helen Wills and swimmer Gertrude Ederle, helped embolden women to seek self-fulfillment by challenging the status quo.”

“After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.”