Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.
I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits.
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.
You really ought to read more books -- you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.
All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.
I'm not sure what I'll do, but -- well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.
There's so much spring in the air -- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.
Men don't often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
