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It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions.
The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees—only
he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.
It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.
And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.
She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.
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,
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.
“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”
if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall to your ambitions.
“Beauty and love pass, I know. . . . Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—” “Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony. . . .”
he wanted people to like his mind again—after a while it might be such a nice place in which to live.
There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away from it again—backing away from life itself.
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
Oh, I was young, for I could turn again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.
Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed, high on the long, mazed wires—eerie half-laughter echoes here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk.
Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.
he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.
He didn’t at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situation—instead, he had a sense of coming home.
The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her—she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.
All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain—and he lay awake in the clear darkness.
the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened . . . the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”
The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the golden beauty of four.
Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived.
the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.
