Life is a series of successful gestures...
Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas – that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.
Please do not have a band, as I do not care for music.
But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and as far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling.
It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.
Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful- then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards.
Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say.
Don’t ever phone if you can possibly come yourself. Don’t ever leave if you can stay.
Now you’ve a clean start... you’ve brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.
I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.
It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic tastes.
She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one- the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul.
She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.
Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.
Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.
This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: ‘Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.’ On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
What was the promise with the head sick?
He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.