Bollie was a sort of chain-talker, lighting one end of a conversation to another without letting the first go out.
I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.
I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.
It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.
For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.
To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.
I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet.
There isn’t anything you do in life that isn’t a gamble, Gorce,” he replied.
Why? Oh, Holy Cow!” I groaned. “Please not to use these ridiculous expressions,” he exploded in exasperation. “I have never heard any other Americans use them except those – what do you call them – those cartoon animals. Mickey Mouse.” “Micky Mice,” I said firmly.
Silk – that’s what I want rubbing against me. I feel so woolen all the time.
These waiters were hand-picked for pleurisy, deafness, and a variety of speech defects. They were flushed of skin, gnarled of hand. The dishes that jumped on to the floor from their palsied hands were never referred to again, as it were, but just lay there for the rest of the evening to be ground under foot by passers-by.
She stared at the goldfish bowl uncertainly. “I can never remember whether I’ve fed him or not,” she said suddenly. “I kept on feeding them and they kept on dying all the time. All but one. So I don’t know if he killed the rest or if I was over-feeding them or starving them or what. You’re supposed to give them a pinch of food every day. But how big is a pinch anyway?
We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.
If his wife doesn’t want him, I certainly don’t, was my way of putting it.
I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything.
Now.′ He said, ‘I have to ask you three question. How old are you? Are you in love? And what in God’s name are you doing here?
I had a sinister premonition of how embarrassing an homme fatal could be when his charms are no longer fatal to you.
Spring was ravishing around town, bursting and budding and blooming. It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.
All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Everything seemed to fall into place. Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.
When passing a certain field near the railroad tracks John Allen Cooke, a black former truck driver, often points to it saying: “This is where I used to see Elvis laying around. Killing time. He was real quiet. Thinking about his music, I guess...