They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
Oh God! One minute it’s my world, and the next I’m the world’s fool.
He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter her and the prospect gave him a leaden feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and tomorrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his arms while she slept light under the luminal; in the early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form, with words of tenderness and protection, and she slept again with his face against the warm scent of her hair.
For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind – the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.
Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that’s close to me and that I can understand.
He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much that his friends had to explain him away somehow –.
Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.
Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single people to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys.
Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.
I love you. Do you hear? I’m telling you all of a sudden, but it isn’t new with me. I love you.
He felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain concealed; that one could parade a casualness into his presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived.
The thing to do is to forget about the heat,′ said Tom impatiently. ‘You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.
This is your child, and you’ll have to make the best of it.
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man.
The room rang full of her artificial laughter.
Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.
He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale – and yet they weren’t unhappy either.