I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.
Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
He was his wife’s man and not his own.
You don’t have to dance – just get out there on the floor and shake.
She began to cry – she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath.
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
And afterward tracing down the hot sinister shin of the Italian boot with the wind soughing around those eerie castles, the dead watching from up on those hills.
That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply. “What is?” “All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?
My life, my life has to be like this. It has to keep going up.
For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.
Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony.
For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.
I went in – after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove – but I don’t believe they heard a sound.
The dripping became a flow and formed an oily pool that glistened brightly, reflecting a dozen tremulous moons on its quivering bosom.
When you smile-” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.
Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.
Joel did not quite believe in picture actresses’ grief. They have other preoccupations – they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them.
Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.
I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.