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She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine,
She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
“But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”
May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.
Her education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.
. . She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit.
I understand this
She was all he had expected, and he was happy and eager to make that night the centre of every dream.
As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned.
“Oh, don’t be so darned feminine.” Her lips curled slightly. “I’ll be anything I want.”
You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.
at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.
Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such “household arts” as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud
You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted.
too true
“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”
CECELIA: (Cynically) You’re glad so you can get married and live on Long Island with the fast younger married set. You want life to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link. ROSALIND: Want it to be one! You mean I’ve found it one.
ROSALIND: (Leaning forward confidentially) For that first moment, when he’s interested. There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.
For this is wisdom—to love and live, To take what fate or the gods may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion’s ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, in time—let go.
That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We can’t have any more scenes like this.
(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.)
No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.
With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other.
thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it.
