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.
He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind.
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.
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, 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 I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.
Human sympathy has its limits.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
There are no second acts in American lives.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
