Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.
Henry turned his hat in his hands but went on looking at Diana in a way that made her want to crawl into his arms and stay there forever.
Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.
It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days. And so I will try to tell you, while I still remember, how it was then, before everything changed-that final season of the era that roared.
Sometimes ends are in fact beginnings; beginnings ends.
We have glimpsed in it the future of high society: wealth without class.
The best heroines, she’d always believed, took their fate into their own hands.
Before her angry impulses got the better of her, she admonished herself that she was born to win and that one did not win by throwing temper tantrums – at least not outside of one’s own home, which could result in vicious, spurious rumors.
Travel always excited her – the strong and unfamiliar smells, the movement, the anxiety of arrival and departure times, she shouting of conductors, the idea of her tired old self changed by ever new surroundings.
What a privilege it is to live now, at just this moment, and to be able to go anywhere...
One did not win by throwing temper tantrums.
Nothing was really so bad, if you were brave enough to confront it.
Elizabeth had followed her heart, and no one ever regrets that.
She was realizing for the first time in her life what agony it was to experience such unquiet beneath an impeccable veneer.
It occurred to him, for the first time, that it did unflattering things to a person when affection was taken away from them. For there had been a time when she had seemed gorgeous, and fun, and all of her naughtiness had had for him a kind of irresistible pull. It was only after he decided he didn’t want her anymore that she became a shrew, and obliterated his memory of the girl she used to be.
Villains often come with pretty faces.
She would mend her broken heart, only to find it broke easily again. Different men loved differently, she would discover, and every one would leave her a little older, a little wiser, and with more feeling to translate into the pages of her notebooks.
But I have never for a moment wavered in my belief that we would make each other very happy, and I swear to you, with my whole being, and no matter the circumstances, I do absolutely want you.
Elizabeth realized with sadness how easy everything would be if she simply did not exist.
The only way to leave forever is to do so as quickly as possible.
What else would she have to go through, she wondered, to fill up the pages of the story of her life? That volume was already very crammed.