It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself.
I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
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.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
Actually that’s my secret – I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.