No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.
So, for the shoddiness of needs, are shoes made out of last year’s hide.
Then the door opened and she came into the room – and it was as though everything in it suddenly blurred before his eyes. He had not remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow pale and his voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.
Still – so many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.
And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.
She won’t marry him, but a girl doesn’t have to marry a man to break his heart.
He stared at her, and the impression of her beauty grew until, uncommitted by a word, by even a formal introduction, he felt himself going out toward her, watching the turn of her lips and the shifting of her cheeks when she smiled.
Oh, nothing – only I want sentiment, real sentiment – and I never find it.
All of them began to laugh spontaneously because they knew it was still last night while the people in the streets had the delusion that it was bright hot morning.
It’s just a crazy old thing. I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.
The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.
Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious. Weep not for me but for thy children.
You see, I am fate,” it shouted, “and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.
I never care what I do, so I always have a good time.
The doctors told me’ – her voice sang on a confidential note – ’that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dead, and in his grave – long in his grave.
It’s just us. We’re pitiful, that’s all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
Our specialty is stories about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they smile so much. You’d think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian peasant was suicide – ” “Six.
They had forgotten – as people inevitably forget.
Fine dives have been made from flimsier spring-boards.