Tell me about it. Tell me about your private life, Baby, and your opinions. You never do – we always talk about Nicole.
Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
The way he looked at Julia made her feel attractive. For half an hour, as their sentences floated pleasantly among the scent of violets and snowdrops, forget-me-nots and pansies, her interest in him grew.
A woman never knows what a good man she’s got till after she turns him down.
We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad i said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from the beginning to end. First he nodded politely and then his face broke into that radiant understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.
Men don’t know how to be really angry or really happy – and the ones that do, go to pieces.
As she crossed the threshold her face caught the room’s last light and brought it outside with her.
He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his speech.
That was one manifestation of fear, the voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.
Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.
Then you don’t think the artist works from his intelligence?” “No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living.
There is a loneliness that only exists in the mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.
He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want – not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable.
The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air.
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street – and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art – and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
Well I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.