Young men just don’t drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.
What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacing back and forth, its disastrous retreats!
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven halfway between death and immortality.
It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed – it soothed him.
My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.
She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life – even rather romantic.
A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.
And then in a jiffy he was under the high ceiling of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read and entertained.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remarks the futility of themselves.
There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful – then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
Every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure.
You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.
My head aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a white cat will explain, I think. I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I’m sure I could control everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was Wednesday. It.
They are glad to see each other now – their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity.
Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.
His day, usually a jellylike creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, towards a climax, as a play should, as a day should.
He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace.
It seemed a tragedy to want nothing – and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashed what is was – some path of hope to lead him towards what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.