- On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet. Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun. (Prologue)
- "You must always remember," says his English friend Cecil Spring Rice, "that the President is about six." (Prologue)
- Mrs. Roosevelt has let it be known that she considers him one of her own brood, to be disciplined accordingly. (Prologue)
- Introduced to a party of people who ignore their own chauffeur, he protests: "I have not met this gentleman." (Prologue)
- Then, ... he moves on to the study of hawks, minnows, and crayfish. The latter rather defeats his childish powers of description: "Look at a lobster," he suggests, "and you have its form." (Chapter One)
- When Mittie, in great disgust, threw out a littler of field-mice, her son loudly bemoaned "the loss to Science--the loss to Science." (Chapter One)
- He [Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.] leaps like a tiger upon a monk who shoves Teedie aside, and hurls him bodily into the crowd." (Chapter One)
- "Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow
and her face stired
up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never." (Chapter One)
- "... I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age ... The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet prevent my doing any damage whatever in return ... Accordingly, with my father's hearty approval, I started to learn to box." (Chapter Two)
- He was "queer," he was "crazy," he was "a bundle of eccentricities," but he was wholly interesting. (Chapter Three)
- The evidence is that they
tolerated him
(to one debutante, he was "studious, ambitious, eccentric--not the sort to appeal at first") until they found they had grown fond of him. (Chapter Three)
- Sex, to him, was part of the mystical union of marriage, and, however pleasurable as an act of love, its function was to procreate. Outside of marriage, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist. (Chapter Three)
- There are erasures and pages torn out of Theodore's diaries, yet also the ecstatic declaration, when he finally fell in love, "Thank Heaven, I am ... perfectly pure." (Chapter Three)
- "He [Theodore, Sr.] has just been buried. I shall never forget these terrible three days; the hideous suspense of the ride on; the dull, inert sorrow, during which I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away, and the two moments of sharp, bitter agony, when I kissed the dear dead faced and realized that he would never again on this earth speak to me or greet me with his loving smile, and then when I heard the sound of the first clod dropping on the coffin holding the one I loved dearest on earth." (Chapter Three)
- "Oh, I feel so sad when I think of the word 'never'." (Chapter Three)
- Never--it was the word he had repeated over and over again in his childhood diaries, when longing for the unrecoverable past. (Chapter Three)
- Yet he loved riding even more, and spurred his horse Lightfoot to prodigious feats of endurance, including one twenty-mile gallop. (Chapter Three)
- As her own first "Teddy" lingered softly in his ears, he vowed, with all the strength of his passionate nature, that he would marry her. (Chapter Three)
- "As long as I live," he wrote afterward, "I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me." (Chapter Four)
- Just two more meetings were enough to convince him "that win her I would, if it were possible," and to affirm that "I had never before cared ... a snap of my finger for any girl." (Chapter Four)
- She found him by no means a romantic attraction. The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses; the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs--these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. (Chapter Four)
- "She seems like a star of heaven ... my pearl, my pure flower." (Chapter Four)
may 25 2010 ∞
jun 17 2010 +