Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist.
She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.
The purpose of life on earth is that the soul should grow – So Growl By doing what is right.
Those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re fools for not knowing better.
Maybe I’m getting tired – I can’t think of anything but nights with you. I want them warm and silvery.
Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o’clock.
We couldn’t go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.
Since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with.
I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.
I’ve tried so many times to think of a new way to say it – and it’s still I love you – love you – love you – my Sweetheart.
We will have each other and we can be safe and warm.
Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes.
Kiss me, lover. One darling kiss.
She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.
It is very melancholy without you. I love you more all the time and since I did not think there was any more it’s an overwhelming and frightening state to be in.
Goodnight dear. If you were in my bed it might be the back of your head I was touching, where the hair is short, or it might be up in the front where it makes little caves above your head. But wherever it was, it would be the sweetest place, the sweetest place.
I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.
That was one of the ways she established social dominance over people: she would sit and watch until she frightened them, and then suddenly be friendly and free and just as charming as she had been formidable.
Won’t we be quite the pair? You with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.
Her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe.
Lady Sylvia flapped across the room like an opaque protoplasm propelling itself over a sand-bank.