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Ilka Chase

  • The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century — glossy, brash, and insecure.

  • All the humiliating, tragicomic, heartbreaking things happened to me in my girlhood, and nothing makes me happier than to realize I cannot possibly relive my youth.

  • Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

  • Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

  • I always felt that the boiled potato, not the tudor rose, should be the national emblem.

  • I've got a heart like a college prom. Each one I dance with seems the best of all.

  • ... when men don't like another man everyone assumes he's no good and that the men know what they are talking about, yet when women dislike another woman people just think they're being catty.

  • We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.

  • ... in love, gallantry is necessary. Even when the first wild desire is gone, especially then, there is an inherent need for good manners and consideration, for the putting forth of effort. Two courteous and civilized human beings out of the loneliness of their souls owe that to each other.

  • The only people who never fail are those who never try.

    • Ilka Chase,
    • in Vogue's Fireside Book ()
  • Between frivolity and intentional mischief there is little difference, none in the results.

  • It must in candor be said that his religion sat upon him lightly.

  • Like most people who have reached the top, I think she finds that the staying is harder than the climb.

  • Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines ...

  • It occurred to me that we live in a lunatic world where the only way to maintain peace is to have an enormous war-making machine.

  • Love at a distance may be poignant; it is also idealized. Contact, more than separation, is the test of attachment.

  • The very fact that we make such a to-do over golden weddings indicates our amazement at human endurance. The celebration is more in the nature of a reward for stamina.

  • Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

  • Mrs. Honeywell was a reader, but those publishing houses demanding intellectual cooperation from the customers were not her field.

  • Second fiddle is better than no music at all.

  • ... everything you experience is what constitutes you as a human being, but the experience passes away and the person's left. The person is the residue.

  • On the whole, I haven't found men unduly loath to say, 'I love you.' The real trick is to get them to say, 'Will you marry me?'

    • Ilka Chase,
    • in This Week ()
  • To me travel is a triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection.

  • Travel may be uncomfortable; it may be downright painful or dangerous, tedious or fatiguing; one may encounter climates that depress, freeze, or suffocate, foods than sicken, and bugs that bite, and the hotel doesn't exist that shelters one as felicitously as one's own home, but the traveler born is stimulated rather than deterred by hardship and the unexpected, and it is rare indeed that he regrets a journey into the unknown or a return visit to the foreign but familiar and beloved.

  • Like building a house, travel always costs more than you estimate.

  • I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

  • Believe me, nothing is so calculated to lose you audience sympathy as too many tears. Move your listeners all you can but let them do the crying.

  • When traveling abroad if you see something you yearn for if you can afford it at all, buy it. If you don't you'll regret it all your life.

  • That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

  • Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather.

  • There are three things the prospective traveler to Russia does well to bear in mind. One: It is their country. Two: Most foreigners are profoundly relieved that this is so. Three: You don't have to go.

  • Keeping your coat on indoors in Russia, no matter how public the place, is far worse than keeping your hat on as the flag goes by. It is worse than going into a Catholic church in Spain with your upper arms bare. It is worse than telling a mother her baby bores you.

  • When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beaten us to it.

    • Ilka Chase,
    • in Jilly Cooper and Tom Hartman, eds., Violets and Vinegar ()
  • Next to a good meal and possibly a long night's sleep the greatest morale builder, as far as women are concerned, is clothes.

    • Ilka Chase,
    • "Why Women Dress Up," The New York Times Magazine ()
  • She never had a proposal, only propositions.

    • Ilka Chase
  • Prolonged statistics are a lethal dose, which if it does not kill will certainly dispel your audience.

    • Ilka Chase
  • It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

    • Ilka Chase
  • You can always spot a well-informed man — his views are the same as yours.

    • Ilka Chase

Ilka Chase, U.S. writer, actor, radio/TV personality

(1900 - 1978)

Full name: Ilka Chase Murray Brown.