Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.
As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
I don’t like girls in the daytime,′ he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: ‘But I like you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I like you first and second and third.
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.
Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
In the morning you were never violently sorry – you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...
This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance – that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it – then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind...
I want to do everything in the world with you.
I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.
Her voice is full of money.
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.