So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
It takes two to make an accident.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.
There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.
I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…
...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
I'm a cynical idealist.
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.
I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.
Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you
I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.
All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.
If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. --The Sensible Thing
I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
Unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
We all have souls of different ages
So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.
