Fitzgerald Scott Quotes

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

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

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

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 summer.

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

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

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 should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

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

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

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

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

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

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

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.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

It takes two to make an accident.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

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

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…

Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.' You'll always be like this to me.' Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

I'm a cynical idealist.

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

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

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 had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

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, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

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

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. --The Sensible Thing

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

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.

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

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

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.

You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

We all have souls of different ages

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.

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

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

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.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.

She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.

So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.

Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

For what it’s worth... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

People living alone get used to loneliness.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

Human sympathy has its limits.

A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

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 of eating it all over again.

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

Thanks again for saving me. Someday, I’ll save you too.

Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

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.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

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

And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ....

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

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 pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.