The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t.
Only, I wonder – the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildy?
Ah no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience.
The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him; it always hung on him in uneasy folds.
Obviously he had aspired too high, or been too impatient; but it was his nature to be aspiring and impatient, and if he was to succeed it must be on the lines of his own character.
It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
Well – watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don’t think people happier in hell.
Of course he’s good-he’s too stupid to be bad.
It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.
It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.