And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something” – her eyes went skyward exultantly – “I found something!
To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.
He made no self-accusations: never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable, unmoral.
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this “woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life – not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
So the men did, and they died.
A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and everyone found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabella manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable.
Jay Gatsby: Old sport.
From the first Amory loved Princeton – its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds.
Talent doesn’t starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you’ve found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who’s an intellectual also.
For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal –.
He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blase sophistication.
In my younger and more vulnerables years...
He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored self-confidence in men.
I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. one thing I know. If living isn’t’ a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.
The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding...
She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.
With the influence of a dress her personality had also undergone a change.
Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
All the babies breaking things and grabbing at the cake, and each mama going home thinking about the subtle superiority of her own child to every other child there.