Interesting” people were her favorite hobby. She collected them: the type who did gay things late at night and smoked cigarettes in mixed company, those would have most scandalized her own mother.

Good girls hold their heads high by daylight, Their grace and their virtue soaring with kites,While bad girls slink along in their shame-Everyone stares at them, everyone blames.But those bad girls sleep soundly at night,Ne’er...

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

All really interesting girls invent themselves.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams.The girls of 1929.

Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.

It is a fact of big cities that one girl’s darkest how is always another’s moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.

Her heart the damned thing had begun to race and she only hoped that the rapid inflation and deflation of her chest wasn’t visible beneath her fitted bodice.

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.

She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.

Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.

Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes.

Even when a girl is married she still never completely leaves her mother and father’s home.

Heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery.

She was trying to sound tough and impatient, but she knew that vulnerable desire to be wooed was still brimming in her tone.

As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn’t be.

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

You don’t need to marry a man with millions. You only need to be your exquisite self.

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

Don’t go looking for boys in the darkThey will say pretty things thenleave you with scars.Do go looking for boys in the parkFor that is where the true gentlemen are.

Ah well that I can’t tell you.” Diana ducked her head so that the brim of her bonnet covered her face. “Some things must remain a mystery and for now I think I’ll keep my...

Diana knew it wouldn’t be right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,’ he said.

Already she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go, and she knew that it was enought to bury her alive.

Darling, don’t be silly, your whole future is ahead of you. All you have to do is go out there and ask for a part- something small and reasonable just to start with. From there,...

I’ve always believed in savoring the moments. In the end, they are the only things we’ll have.

The first stab of love is like a sunset, a blaze of color — oranges, pearly pinks, vibrant purples…

Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl’s time.

What was it about that short creature with her wild hair and spurious air of purity and why would anyone much less two men love her and to such disastrous ends.

I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn’t know what she has. That’s the heart of it. She’s like some wild creature who hasn’t a clue the worth of its coat.

I can’t imagine what my life was before. I can’t imagine ever being without you for very long again.

A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.

Edith who had still not fully recovered from the debauchery at the Hayeses’ had glaced at the letter before dinner but she apparently lacked the energy to pry. “Oh to be young as you ”...

The headiest loves were the loves that couldn’t be.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she’d always believed took their fate into their own hands.

Henry wondered not for the first time if her blood ran red or black.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

She now saw that she wanted a boy to do more than follow her in blind devotion. She wanted a boy to challenge her, to tell her about things she’d never thought of, to show...

The world is such a marvel-it gave you trials, but if you were still and concentrated, if you tried to do the right thing, it always provided you with salvation.

Henry shook his head, ‘I was drunk,’ he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the...

Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.

It’s the craziest thing, but I can’t stop thinking about you.

It was like the color of his eyes, she supposed – not quite one shade or another, and utterly unlike anyone else’s.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh...

THE LUXE IS . . .Pretty girls in pretty dresses, partying until dawn.Irresistible boys with mischievous smiles and dangerous intentions.White lies, dark secrets, and scandalous hookups.This is Manhattan in 1899.

She thought of Henry and Diana on the stoop gazing at each other with the confusion and sadness of two puppies who have just stumbled into their first puddle and not yet come to understand...

It had been too much for Edith to take and she had gone to her room so that her nieces wouldn’t see her cry anymore.

Girls,” their mother interjected, “you must both stop being strange – it is unattractive. And don’t forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at...