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.
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Murder your darlings.
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.
Character is plot, plot is character.
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.