It was disgraceful but also romantic enough to make Lina’s heart turn.

I know that I might die but that seems a happier end than being without you and anyway it seems to me that looking in the face of hard things and still being able to...

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.