Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world?
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.
I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.
It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.
Being in love, she concluded, is simply the presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life.
I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.
But I warn you, I am only really myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.
Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.
All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own-to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.
Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself.
The night you gave me my birthday party… you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.
Those men think I'm purely decorative, and they're fools for not knowing better.
Nothing could have survived our life.
It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
Scott-there's nothing in the world I want but you-and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. I'd just hate to live in a sordid, colorless existence-because you'd soon love less-and less-and I'd do anything-anything-to keep your heart for my own-I don't want to live-I want to love first and live incidentally.
David, I'll fly for you, if you'll love me!
Thanks again for saving me. Someday, I'll save you too.
They hadn't much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.
It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.
The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.
She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.
Kiss me, lover. One darling kiss.
All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms under the moon - the dearest arms in all the world - darling arms that I love to feel around me - How much longer - before they'll be there to stay? When I do get home again, you'll certainly have a most awful time ever moving me one inch from you.
I don't want to live— I want to love first, and live…incidentally.
Maybe I'm getting tired – I can't think of anything but nights with you. I want them warm and silvery.
Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn't quite because we were too smart for them!
I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.
There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.
My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.
Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.
I play the radio and moon about...and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.
I love you, even if there isn't any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.
By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the hearth can hold.
Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o'clock.
I don't want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.
I'm so damn glad I love you – I wouldn't love any other man on earth – I b'lieve if I had deliberately decided on a sweetheart, he'd have been you.
I don't suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.
And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember – that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.
We will have each other and we can be safe and warm.
Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.
Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow? Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.
Death is the only real elegance.
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'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.
A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.
She tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak.
