In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality.
They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
No, I’m romantic – a sentimental person thinks things will last – a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional.
If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me – how absurd this sounds – I’d still want you, I’d still love you. I KNOW, my darling.
There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night, for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world.
You loved me too?” he repeated.
The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness – hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph.
These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyse me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase – ‘I love you.
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.
Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an orange glory.
His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.
Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?′ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ ‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.