There was a midsummer restlessness abroad – early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer, one tried anxiously to live in the present – or, if there was no present, to invent one.
Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalind – all Rosalinds – as he had never in the world loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.
I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
Listen! The world only exists in your eyes – your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked – it’s the Grand Canyon.
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.
It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs-Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter-like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely.
A man can be twice young in the life of his sons only.
One autumn night, years before, they came to a place where the moonlight stopped and change was among the stars.
My courage is faith – faith in the eternal resilience of me – that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.
Whenever you feel like criticising any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him.
Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that the earliest and strongest of protections is gone?
She had loved him always and just before she died, all unwilling and surprised, his tenderness had burst and surged forward and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and death together – with the world in which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there.
It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves.
She was ashamed not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms because they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them – hiding miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by what she found there.
She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance – actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage.
Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence – time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.