All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.
I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.
No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.
I’m not much like myself any more.
No one should live beyond 30.
Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...
When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.
Beautiful things only grow to a certain height, and then they fail and fade off.
How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.
We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. “Five years next November.” The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.
He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
I was too absorbed to be responsive.
He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.
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.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.