It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel – accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale.
All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.
Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub.
One of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, “Sure. Sure I like it. It’s nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones.” – Stewardess to Cecelia Brady.
The very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs.
My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgement – the judgement to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.
As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.
It was good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves.
They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais.
No,′ she said; ‘I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you – I like all clever men, you more than any – but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man – ’ She broke off suddenly.
Oh, Clara!′ Amory said; ’what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!
When a girl comes out, she needs all the attention.
General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t – he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle – there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.
Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.
When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.
His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as “Hades – Your Opportunity,” or else a plain “Welcome” sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights.
Her cream-colored dress, alternately blue or gray as they walked, and.
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher – a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away.
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It.
I don’t like innuendo in these deafening English whispers.