I talk with the authority of failure.
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.
He put his arms around her, enclosing her completely as if he didn’t want even the intangible to escape.
Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape.
But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ‘em or shock ‘em.” Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde.
He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.
She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.
It was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope, desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.
Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity – we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the.
Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression – yet it was probably that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last.
On the contrary. When a man speaks he’s merely tradition. He has at best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity.
Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing.
It’s your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You’ve got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You’ve got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You’ve got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands.
No,” Amory objected. “I’ve lost half my personality in a year.” “Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “You’ve lost a great amount of vanity and that’s all.
Sometimes she speaks of ‘the past’ as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience.
He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears.
Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent...
And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.” “Not a bit of will – I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires – ” “You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.
He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself.