Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding – it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.
I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses – bound for dust – mortal –.
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.
A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.
The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed – the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.
You don’t know what a trial it is to be – like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. – The Great Gatsby.
Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.
The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
A writer wastes nothing.
Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.
The bottle of whiskey – the second one – was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ’felt just as good on nothing at all.
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.