The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.
There was the starlight set upon the brilliant darkness; and there were her pale cool cheeks, and he let himself be lost in love for her, as he had so wanted to do.
He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.
All the bright precious things fade so fast.
You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!
That’s my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I’m all for the criminals – give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you’d have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving-picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.
When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.
I can never judge a man while he’s talking.
There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea. And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.
I thought you weren’t afraid.” “I never am – but I won’t throw my life away just to show one man I’m not.
I suppose all great happiness is a little sad.
Almost painfully he took his eyes from her.
He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.” Anthony laughed again. “Surely.
He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colourful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust.
The feel of her head against his shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her.
Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle –.
The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.