If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.
Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.
The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights.
Kiss me a paragraph and I’ll reply with a novel.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality – he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance – making her wonder, through these nebulous half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality. Years.
He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark...
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
His desire re-created her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love – an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer – not to perish till he could say, ‘I never really loved her.
He had fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value.
Maybe we’ll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.
I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She.
The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor – and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet.
She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do – they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
Be’, non sai mai esattamente che posto hai occupato nella vita degli altri.