More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.”
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.
In the “quest” book the hero set off in life armed with the best weapons and avowedly intending to use them as such weapons are usually used, to push their possessors ahead as selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes of the “quest” books discovered that there might be a more magnificent use for them.
I’ve just discovered that I’ve a mind, and I’m starting to read.” “Read what?” “Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think.
They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might have followed.
“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid,”
I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life and didn’t have a weak will.”
Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold.
She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air
Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her,
People tried afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever.
He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired minds as at an absorbing play.
most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality,
I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—”
She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.
“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.”
She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance.
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred.
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”
if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall to your ambitions.
A man can be twice young In the life of his sons only.
May the Son of God be above him and beneath him, before him and behind him May the King of the elements cast a mist over the eyes of the King of Foreign, May the Queen of the Graces lead him by the hand the way he can go through the midst of his enemies and they not seeing him May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him
Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid
crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best.
dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.
her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.
There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted.
The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
He had taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the first flush of pain.
Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature.
men can stand anything if they get used to it,
he wanted people to like his mind again—after a while it might be such a nice place in which to live.
the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.
You make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion.
Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.
As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a subject” and stop talking with the definite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had followed the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first.
When Eleanor’s arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her.
he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.
They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms,
it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable.
you have a tendency toward wavering that prevents you from being the entire light of my life.”
Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable,
here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.
I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a first-class man.
“And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.”
Amory’s love waned slowly with the moon.
Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.
It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.”
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
