I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she...

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an...

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are,...

Durante il fragoroso decollo Dick si sentì intorpidito, rendendosi conto di quanto fosse stanco. Un’enorme persuasiva tranquillità s’impossessò di lui, e lasciò la malattia ai malati, il rumore ai motori, la direzione ai piloti.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from...

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

My courage is faith–faith in the eternal resilience of me–that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high...

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.

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll...

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the...

I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm—but to fat women? To bony women? To women with scrawny cheeks?

Medeniyet yok oluyor” diye bağırdı Tom öfkeyle, “Ben artık bu konuda karamsarım. Şu Goddard denen adamın yazdığı The Rise of the Coloured Empires adlı kitabı okudun mu?

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him – like an actor...

He was good looking, “sort of distinguished when he wants to be”, had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to...

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up...

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves – that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives – experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time...

When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

In the morning you were never violently sorry– you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days...

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily,...

I became bored – that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

I found something! Courage–just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

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.

That most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man”.

These things excite me so,’ she whispered. ‘If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my...

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the...

That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night)

You see, this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding–it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of...

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.’ ‘The whole campus is alive with them.’ They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the...

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power – to certain people at certain times an essential...