All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.

That was one of the ways she established social dominance over people: she would sit and watch until she frightened them, and then suddenly be friendly and free and just as charming as she had been formidable.

The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Everything pursues its own ends and skies stay warm + beneficent -- though winter time always leaves many vagrant nostalgias and a sense of more supply than demand of Time and of the portentousness of the weather.

Isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate?

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

People are like almanacs, Bonnie -- you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.

It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.

I don't suppose I really know you very well -- but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.

I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.

I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.

I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.

Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered -- and I was delivered to you -- to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a buttonhole bouquet.

And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember -- that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.

Everybody gives you belief for the asking, she said to David, and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief--just not letting you down, that's all. It's so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.' 'So easy to be loved -- so hard to love.' David answered.

Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.