I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.
She had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening.
There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe – why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
Wilson and his cabinet – a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles.
All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness – and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.
And for the first time in four months aroused his old version and horror towards all the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind.
But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.
In fact, I once imagined you loved me a little bit, if you’ll excuse the presumption.
Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn’t always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?
You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knwing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.
I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Which are you?” “I’m feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an’ most of these girls.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that.
She’s got an indiscreet voice,’ I remarked. ‘It’s full of – – ‘ I hesitated. ‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
But I believe you are absolutely incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity.
His voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities.
He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind.
There was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking – and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?
Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin- too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious.
No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,” she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I simply don’t, that’s all.