I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.
At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire – I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.
Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know – because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.