I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.
Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” – Hildegarde.
How strange to have failed as a social creature – even criminals do not fail that way – they are the law’s “Loyal Opposition,” so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.