He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must...

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

They always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’- a year later they rail at...

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her,...

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun...

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?” –

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things...

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been...

Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.