You insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen angels.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was.
The conversation of the gods! – I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language – star-talk.
I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.
I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.
It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
My dream had become my reality: my old life was a discarded husk.
To see things as they really were – what an empoverishment!
Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections.
Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
Grown-ups didn’t seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.