Tender is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

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.

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing,” he said. “Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” In the taxi with Dick and Collis Clay—they

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

she was the first morning in May

No place to go except close.

Her face had changed with his looking up at it; there was the eternal moonlight in it. “That

Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really—I’m just a—I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”