Art isn’t meaningless… It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

Amerikalıların ara sıra toprak kölesi olmayı istedikleri olur, ama köylü sınıfından olmaya karşı hep direnmişlerdir.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis – these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis’. But the Minneapolis years...

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer,...

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: ‘We’ll be poor, won’t we? Like people in books. And I’ll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!’ She stopped and raised...

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it’s every girl for herself.

I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Take off that darn fur coat!…Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.

Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May...

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type: begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are...

their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity.

Character is plot, plot is character.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed–the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the...

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

No,” interrupted Marcia emphatically. “And you’re a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me.”Horace stopped quickly in front of her.”Why do you want me to kiss you?” he asked intently. “Do you just go round...

Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.” Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool,” she repeated.She...

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

Çok içen insanların yanında ayık kalmak her zaman faydalıdır. Her şeyden önce dilinizi bağlar, fazla gevezelik etmezsiniz. Daha da güzeli insanın kendi kusur ve yanlışlarını örtebilmesidir, nasılsa kimsenin sizi kimsenin sizi görecek hali olmaz. Zira...

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took...

One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet...

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted...

There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines...

I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.

I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do...

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath – and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and...

You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and...

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a...

That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake...

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself – art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria – he could accept what was...

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

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.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.