Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the room.
I had a dog – at least I had him for a few days until he ran away.
She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the music from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future...
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.
The sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
Tell me about it. Tell me about your private life, Baby, and your opinions. You never do – we always talk about Nicole.
Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
The way he looked at Julia made her feel attractive. For half an hour, as their sentences floated pleasantly among the scent of violets and snowdrops, forget-me-nots and pansies, her interest in him grew.
A woman never knows what a good man she’s got till after she turns him down.
We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad i said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from the beginning to end. First he nodded politely and then his face broke into that radiant understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.
Men don’t know how to be really angry or really happy – and the ones that do, go to pieces.
As she crossed the threshold her face caught the room’s last light and brought it outside with her.
He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his speech.
That was one manifestation of fear, the voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.
Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.
Then you don’t think the artist works from his intelligence?” “No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living.
There is a loneliness that only exists in the mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.
He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want – not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable.