One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before.
Tell me. I’ll believe it. I always believe anything anyone tells about myself – don’t you?
Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!
New York, he supposed, was home – the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams.
After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is.
He fought with a desire to kiss her again, even tenderly, and began to tell her that she was being unwise, but before he got really started at this handsome project, she was in his arms again, and whispering something that he had to accept, since it was wrapped up in a kiss.
There was suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem for a solution and resolution. He had experienced an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all else. He was content to let the experiment remain isolated and unique.
It’s a bad town unless you’re on top of it.
Then for a moment they faded into the sweet darkness so deep that they were darker than the darkness, so that for awhile they were darker than the black trees- then so dark that when she tried to look up at him she could but look at the wild waves of the universe over his shoulder and say, ‘Yes, I guess I love you too.
I talk with the authority of failure.
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.
He put his arms around her, enclosing her completely as if he didn’t want even the intangible to escape.
Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape.
But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ‘em or shock ‘em.” Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde.
He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.
She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.
It was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope, desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.
Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity – we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the.
Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression – yet it was probably that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last.