Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.
Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.
This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: ‘Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.’ On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
What was the promise with the head sick?
He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.
Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man.
We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.
I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life – and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.
She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.
She had been kissed once and made love to six times.
If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.
I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?
I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.
All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn.