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.
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 had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
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.