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.
The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. 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...
I feel sure we are the great coming nation – yet” – and she sighed – “I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns –.
It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of their overcoats.
Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.
It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.