I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
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?
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 was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
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.
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
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.
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
I learned a little of beauty– enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth…
I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night)
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
It’s all life is. Just going ’round kissing people.
I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
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.
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
What are you going to do? “Can’t say – run for president, write -” “Greenwich Village?” “Good heavens, no – I said write – not drink.
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.
Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.
Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook.
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.
my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.
They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world….The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead’ he suggested, ‘After that my own rule is to let everything alone’.
For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind – the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.
It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.
The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.
. . . confirmed libertines don’t reform until they’re tired . . .
Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.
Communism…muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.
You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
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
Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
Art isn’t meaningless… It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
Writers aren’t exactly people…. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.
I am glad you are happy–but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.
I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
It was too late – everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
The sea, he thought, had treasured it’s memories deeper than the faithless land.
The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.
Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-
their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity.
Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.
I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices – indefinite, fading, enchanting – just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.
…he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.
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.
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
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.
The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t change the past.”Can’t change the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!
I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t change the past.””Can’t change the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it’s every girl for herself.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
We’ll all be failures?””Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of – of ineffectual and sad, and – oh, how can I tell you?
Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him – like an actor kissed in a picture.
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
I just think of people,” she continued, “whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don’t mind if they don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.
Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you–it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.
After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.
That most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man”.
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll be time to argue.
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life–not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.
Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
Never miss a party…good for the nerves–like celery.
He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.
But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
It’s only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands.
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
He was good looking, “sort of distinguished when he wants to be”, had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire
Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved – to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that…
The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness – the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.
Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.
Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
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.
Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.
Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?” –
She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement.
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis– a moulding of the confusion of life into form.
Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that’s close to me and that I can understand.
one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed–the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want to see (Nicole to Dick).
C’mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ‘At’s the whole trouble
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes…
Take off that darn fur coat!…Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.
I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.
Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.
Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.
All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm
That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
…and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
Whenever you feel like criticzing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you’ve had.
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish.
There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
I became bored – that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
One should … be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
One should … be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Writers aren’t exactly people they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
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.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
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.
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.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
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.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
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.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.