Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
In the morning you were never violently sorry – you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...
This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance – that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it – then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind...
I want to do everything in the world with you.
I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.
Her voice is full of money.
Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.
Is your underwear purple, too?
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool-that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
No one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived.
And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.
At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.