He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.
Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean happiness of can mean the end of the world.
Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.
So we sat and thought deeply for awhile.
I want us to be all mixed up. I don’t want you to go away.
In the early days writing in Paris I would invent not only from my own experience but from the experiences and knowledge of my friends and all the people I had known, or met since I could remember, who were not writers. I was very lucky always that my best friends were not writers and to have known many intelligent people who were articulate.
The sadness will dissipate as the sun rises. It is like a mist.
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking.
Remember the woods were God’s first temples.
So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity.
And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.
You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things you believed and for the new world you had been educated into.
Who’s she?” Georgette turned to me. “Do I have to talk to her?
It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought. “Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.
As I lay on the bed I could see the big mirror on the other side of the room but could not see what it reflected.
But I know many things I can’t say.
The dancers were in a crowd, so you did not see the intricate play of the feet. All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down.
You cannot know about it unless you have it.
After supper we went up-stairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.