They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
The start and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last starts and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
You'll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a light-haired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the world is full of 'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth.
Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles' heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty—the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door.
Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
There was the union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.
She was perhaps the delicious inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.
I used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers.
There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust - mortal.
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of new people.
Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.
I can't tell you just how wonderful she is. I don't want you to know. I don't want any one to know.
Celtic you'll live and Celtic you'll die.
For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.
I used to build dreams about you.
A negligée of robin's-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume, elusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She had gone out.
Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she lay indolently in the hammock….
Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
You see, this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding--it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.
The rich get richer and the poor get - children.
This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out.
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.
Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, anything at all...
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind...
The latter was considered a good fellow and a fine leader, until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult to follow.
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
There was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking—and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?
With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.
I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
Character is plot, plot is character.
A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
The sky was low at night, full of the presence of a strange and watchful God.
He was consumed with wonder by her presence.
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.
Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.
Human sympathy has its limits.
She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.
