Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.
I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe – and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.
Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream’s shadow.
They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.
How different it all was from what you’d planned.
You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth.
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
I found something! Courage – just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
It was too late – everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved – to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...
She was dazzling – alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin – but they don’t, even you and I...
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game.
Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.
It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.