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.
It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.
A precocious mistress of the long look, the sustained smile, the private voice and the delicate touch, devices of generations.
You intoxicated me. It was just as though you were making me love you by some invisible force.
Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.
Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge, anything at all...
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
You seem to be bankrupt – morally as well as financially.
There’s only one lesson to be learned from life anyway... That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.
Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you.
Her sigh was a benediction – an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal – then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside. Up.
Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.
It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth – a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men – –.
I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.