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Go out and live—right? Everyone fights loneliness his own way, but some people have to let others do it for them.
She takes quick flights of fancy and quick flights across the country in quest of someone she had two dates with a month before. She
It’s easier to be tolerant of the past than the present; we change, we want to believe it was all lovely, for to remember it as it was would make us sad again. But
to survive on other people’s terms; we all do that every day, and we call it adjustment, understanding, compromise,
But Melba not only gets along in life on her own terms, they are terms she has enthusiastically adopted from the silliest movie magazines, gossip columns, adolescent fantasies, and bits and pieces of the philosophies of one or two former boyfriends who happened to impress her.
my natural urge for self-improvement,
She added emotionally that dancing was just like life and the only thing that should matter in life was your soul and not external things.
I think it is here I should mention that in life I am a natural-born accomplice. I was the kid whose mother was always saying, “You wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for that Annie!” Or that Bella or that Carol or on through the alphabet, whoever had a scheme to stir up mischief.
The reason I became an actress is because I wanted people to adore me.
I don’t have any theatrical vices like heavy drinking or nymphomania with Younger Men, but I have a weakness for gooey desserts
I am not sure whether it is pride, lack of pride, or an extraordinary confidence in the kindness of unreality.
you didn’t have to play a game with rules every night, that some nights you could just exist.
Here is the point where I should go into a treatise on the perversion of values and how bad company wrecks your soul, but the truth is that when it’s happening you never notice it. You hardly even feel guilty. You just don’t believe any of it is real. It’s all like a game, or a play, and the people in it are going to disappear soon and everything will be all right. You’re not you, even though the streets you walk through are familiar because you walked through them in happier and sadder times when you were you. And you know you’ll walk through them again when you are you again, and all that is
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I suppose people really don’t know their own motivations even when they are so obvious to others as to appear trite.
It’s funny how even at the moment you are discovering how vulnerable somebody is, you can become more jealous of that person because he knew how to fool you. Also, I can tell myself that a girl who has to wear layers of makeup and run to the powder room to comb her hair every half hour is very insecure, but I also know that the end result makes her feel very secure, and so I am jealous of her. I am jealous of her for being able to be happy with so little.
How wonderful, I thought, to have tomorrow all planned, and with such nice men.…
Life isn’t a process of change, it’s just a series of little decisions, so small, most of them, that you don’t even notice when you’re making them; only when you discover the kind of person you have become.
I went through the motions of my life for the rest of the fall, hanging on, going through the motions of being well adjusted and getting well.
There’s no gambling that way. Social graces are dead, shyness is dead, chivalry is dead, tact is dead, game playing is dead, necking is dead, Mr. Right is dead, manners are dead, prudence is dead, expectations of any kind are dead. Only the moment lives. The moment is not an investment, it is an entity.
I sat out the first week like a catatonic, and the second week in a growing agony of paranoia.
You seem to be trying to connect with someone.”
“Not just me.… I have the feeling you want a relationship with everyone you go out with. You want him to have emotions about you.
I don’t know why I slept so well, when I hated him so much.
I’ve learned not to trust words any more.
Maybe even “love” doesn’t mean anything at all, since 99 per cent of the people who rely on the word have different ideas of its meaning. That
“I love it,” she said. “I love it, I love that note. I love you Geraldine. If you don’t love me, pass this on to Harriet.” “That’s not what I said. I said …” “It doesn’t matter what you said. I love it. It’s the story of my life.” “Oh? Which one are you?” “I haven’t decided yet. It’s just the sentiment I love. The relating.”
For the first time, the enormity of her loneliness overwhelmed her, and she clenched her fists against her eyes, shuddering, and wept without tears. Useless and lonely, lonely, lonely … dulled with uselessness and habit, waiting without anticipation. When she looked down again, the couple on the beach were arguing, standing face to face in the awkward, stubborn postures of people who are shouting at each other.
Her face, in those years of our late teens, was a white blur, as I suppose all our faces were, for we did not yet know who we were.
I needed someone to inflict all that creative energy on, it didn’t matter much who.
and I wanted something more, something elusive but wonderful, which I felt must surely be beyond the next corner, or at the next party, or on the threshold of our front door tomorrow night.
He was far from a monster, and he had green eyes and a sense of humor—my two fatal weaknesses
‘Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die.’”
me, the girl who never got anybody in her life!”
people part because of hopelessness.
At least it doesn’t take me as long to find out I’m doomed. I am doomed, you know. I’m the girl they recite poetry to, and then in the mornings they always go back to their wives. It must be me, because I fell in love with two completely different men and neither of them wanted to stay with me.” “It’s not you,” I said. “Neither of them really knew what you were like. If they had, they would have loved you.”
because all that summer Rima was addicted to long, lonely walks. Perhaps she was trying to figure things out; perhaps she was only still in her fantasy of the country wife, and the streets of the summer city were her Old Greenwich roads.
It seemed to me, that lonely morning in St. Thomas, that the Rima I knew had been killed in many fires, rising again from the ashes of each one like a bright bird to sing the song of some wanderer’s need. Had there ever been a real Rima? Born and reborn to a splendid image, she had never looked for her self, nor had anyone else.
