Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss...
The things that’ll make you fail I’ll love always.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.
It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.
You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.
I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.
Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my novels.
Have a drink Tom and then you won’t feel so foolish to yourself.
Love is fragile – she was thinking – but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.
I’m a cynical idealist.
I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?
Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams.
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.