The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed – the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.
You don’t know what a trial it is to be – like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. – The Great Gatsby.
Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.
The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
A writer wastes nothing.
Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.
The bottle of whiskey – the second one – was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ’felt just as good on nothing at all.
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
He dispensed starlight to casual moths.
They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
She was beautiful – but especially she was without mercy.