New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them – this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.
I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm.
That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy – one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.
Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.