They stood an uncomfortable little group weighted down by Abe’s gigantic presence: he lay athwart them like the wreck of a galleon, dominating with his presence his own weakness and self-indulgence, his narrowness and bitterness. All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his surviving will, once a will to love, now become a will to die.
I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me.
In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained on hundred thousand dollars.
But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.
To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first – she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance – actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. She.
Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of new people.
They were all tall and slender with heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a streetlamp, he used to think that he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit that in.
He seduces her because she is slipping away – she lets herself be seduced because of overwhelming admiration. Once settled, it is sensual, breathless, immediate, then gentle and tender for a while.
A classic,” suggested Anthony, “is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation.
Had a hell of a dream about you last night,” came in the cracked voice through the cigar smoke.
I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.” Monsignor.
He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.
I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.
I broke a date for him. To-day I feel I’d break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.
Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together – so often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom regarded it with interest.
As he sat on the side of the bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.
Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.
Of course I’ve got one – a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.
You were brought up to work – not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut – go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him – whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.