Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .
Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.
You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.
Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.
All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him.
but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
"What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.
If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
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.
Let's borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.
Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.
Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining." I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.
The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.