The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness – hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph.
These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyse me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase – ‘I love you.
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.
Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an orange glory.
His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.
Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?′ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ ‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.
Forgotten is forgiven.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.
She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.