The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows – the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back.
But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.
Afterwards he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form – perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it.
I did not think – I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men.
I like these streets... I always feel as though it’s a performance being staged for me; as though the second I’ve passed they’ll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad.
No, I’m thinking about myself – my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.
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 the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.
Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.
That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.
Sleep – real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness – my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.
With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
You probably think you know... The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.
I’m afraid I’m in love with you and that’s not the best thing that could happen.
Sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal.
As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.
Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty.
Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired to that June night.