Fitzgerald Tender Is The Night Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

People living alone get used to loneliness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.

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.

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.

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.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

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.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

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.

the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.

I'm not much like myself any more.

She knew few words and believed in none.

But you can love more than just one person, can't you?

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.

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.

Kiss me now, love me now.

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?

Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.

you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...

We all must try to be good.

...there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.

As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

But some day I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.

When you get drunk you don't tear anything apart except yourself.

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

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 strokes lingering in the mind.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.

The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. 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.

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.

I never understood what common sense mean applied to a complicated problems.

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest...

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game

I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.

She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her 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.

Don't you know you can't do anything about people?

The price for his intactness was incompleteness.

How do you do, Captain,” she said, unfastening her eyes from his with difficulty, as though they had become entangled.

God, am I like the rest after all?"—So he used to think starting awake at night—"Am I like the rest?

I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

They were still in the happier stages 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.

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

There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.

But Dick had come away for his soul's sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year.

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.

How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery!

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love.

Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

I’m afraid I’m in love with you and that’s not the best thing that could happen.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.

but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be…

I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that's the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion.

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

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

She hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick's sun.

The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.

Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas - that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.

Of course I've got one--a man can't live without a moral code. Mine is that I'm against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.

Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you.

Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.

He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain.

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.

Her hair, drawn back off her ears, brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come.

If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that!

You like to help everybody, don't you? I only pretend to.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe’s pitch – he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.

The war spirit's getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I'm going to bomb out this trench.

her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical

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

Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry.

As he held her and tasted her, and she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. 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 religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

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.

she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

It'd be a good setting to jump overboard,' said Dick mildly. 'Wouldn't it?' agreed Nicole hastily. 'Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard a little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

Maybe we'll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally-- that's why I gave this party.

the heterogeneous indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight,...

What was the promise with the head sick?

New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.” With

She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it.

we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

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

He used to think that he wanted to be goos, 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.

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

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.

Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.

Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?” “I’ve wondered for a long time.” “But why bring it to me?” “I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.

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 religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.

Daddy's girl. Was it a 'itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Oooooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn't she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitably became inevitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks. “Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?” “I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?

As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. 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.

McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900.

She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.

Her face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain…

the sensuous heat of early afternoon made blinding freckles on the checkered luncheon cloth.

best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

الاحترام الإنساني يجعلنا لا نتهم إنسانا بأنه جبان أو كاذب ، ولكن إذا قضيت حياتك تحافظين على مشاعر الناس وزهوهم الشخصي فلن يمكنك معرفة ما يجب احترامه فيهم.

لا يمكن للمرء على أية حال أن يعرف بالضبط المساحة التي يحتلها في حياة الآخرين.

إما أن تفكر أو سيفكر الآخرون لك وتكون لهم السلطة عليك ويسلبونك قوتك

It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick).

It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see.

They were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others.

They looked at each other at last, murmuring names that were a spell. Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights.

On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.

They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care - yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.

But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture—the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere.

It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: "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.

Sembra che per sfuggire al dolore dobbiamo ripercorrere gli stessi passi che ci hanno portati lì.

Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity--we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the

She had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening.

He was remembering too vividly the youth and freshness of her lips.

Nothing had ever felt so young as her lips.

She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life — even rather romantic.

Ne gariptir, acıdan kaçınmaya çalışırken, bazen bizi o noktaya getiren ayak izlerinin bir bir üzerinden geçmek gerekebilir.

Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel,

Oh-oh-oh-oh Other flamingos than me

Smart men play close to the line because they have to--some of them can't stand it, so they quit.

Rosemary pojechała do Monte Carlo zgnębiona - na miarę swoich możliwości - wprost bezgranicznie.

Cloaked by the erotic darkness she exhausted the future quickly, with all the eventualities that might lead up to a kiss, but with the kiss itself as blurred as a kiss in pictures.

He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is The Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book.

You were brought up to work - not especially to marry. Now you've found your first nut to crack and it's a good nut - go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him - whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl.

Goodnight, child. This is a damn shame. Let's drop it out of the picture." He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. "So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That's an old-fashioned idea, isn't it?

Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself.

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 kissed in a picture.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the 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.

Gondold csak el, mennyire szeretsz most – suttogta Nicole. – Nem kérem, hogy mindig így szeress, csak azt akarom, hogy ezt sose felejtsd el. Valahol bennem mindig ott él majd az a személy, aki ma este vagyok.

Te mondod folyton, hogy az embernek egyre több dolgot kell megismernie, és ha ezt abbahagyja, olyan lesz, mint a többi ember, és hogy addig kell elérnie valamit, míg ezt a folytonos megismerést abba nem hagyja.

Évszázadok telnek még el, mire egy amazon végre képes lesz fölfogni azt a tényt, hogy a férfi kizárólag a büszkeségében sebezhető meg, de ha ezt egyszer megrobbantják, törékeny lesz az egész ember, akár a tojás.

But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.

She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed - her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances - it was the cupid's bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.

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.

She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a token...

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hand on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

In the square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing - unlike pure heat it held no promise of rural escape by suggested only roads choked with the same four asthma.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse's Hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret wamrth within.

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.

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

Then the storm came swiftly, first falling from the heavens, then doubly falling in torrents from the mountains and washing loud down the roads and stone ditches; with it came a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder, while ragged, destroying clouds fled along past the hotel. Mountains and lake disappeared - the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos and darkness.

God, am I like the rest after all?” — So he used to think starting awake at night — “Am I like the rest?” This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world’s rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. 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.

I've got one more record. - Have you heard "So Long, Letty"? I suppose you have.' 'Honestly, you don't understand - I haven't heard a thing.' Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted he might have added; only hot cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men saying 'There!' hands at the man's chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent...

Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in her arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching in the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions. As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.

He had slowed up to avoid the inevitable end of his thought: "--the frontiers of consciousness." The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine-spun, inbred--eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit. --Not for you, he almost said. It's too tough a game for you.

She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him.

Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year's vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world's dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony.

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

A jó modor annak beismerése, hogy minden ember törékeny, és így csak kesztyűs kézzel szabad bánni vele. Na mármost, az emberi tisztelet… az ember nem könnyen mond egy másik embert gyávának vagy hazugnak, de ha valaki azzal tölti az életét, hogy mások érzelmeit kíméli, a mások hiúságát táplálja, végleg elveszti minden érzékét ahhoz, hogy felismerje, mit kell valóban tisztelnie bennük.

It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and the pretence became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was bring refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time, listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time.

First was a lone cyclist, in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded colour, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired. Tommy faced Dick, saying: 'I think Nicole wants a divorce - I suppose you'll make no obstacles?' A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the victims of accident and defeat.