Maybe we’ll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.
I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She.
The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor – and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet.
She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do – they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
Be’, non sai mai esattamente che posto hai occupato nella vita degli altri.
They stood an uncomfortable little group weighted down by Abe’s gigantic presence: he lay athwart them like the wreck of a galleon, dominating with his presence his own weakness and self-indulgence, his narrowness and bitterness. All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his surviving will, once a will to love, now become a will to die.
I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me.
In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained on hundred thousand dollars.
But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.
To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first – she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance – actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. She.
Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of new people.
They were all tall and slender with heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a streetlamp, he used to think that he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit that in.
He seduces her because she is slipping away – she lets herself be seduced because of overwhelming admiration. Once settled, it is sensual, breathless, immediate, then gentle and tender for a while.
A classic,” suggested Anthony, “is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation.
Had a hell of a dream about you last night,” came in the cracked voice through the cigar smoke.