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.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe’s pitch – he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.
I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?” “That’s why I came over to-night.