Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.
Is your underwear purple, too?
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “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.
The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
No one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived.
And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.
At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.
This isn’t just an epigram – life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong – or else a coward. I’m neither.
For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested – interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.
When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.
Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.
Was everyone followed in the moonlight?
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.
Biography is the falsest of the arts.