If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe’s pitch – he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.
I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?” “That’s why I came over to-night.
Life is a series of successful gestures...
Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas – that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.
Please do not have a band, as I do not care for music.
But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and as far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling.
It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.
Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful- then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards.
Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say.
Don’t ever phone if you can possibly come yourself. Don’t ever leave if you can stay.
Now you’ve a clean start... you’ve brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.
I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.
It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic tastes.
She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one- the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul.
She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.