"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."

"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."

"I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified."

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

"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 of the magical glory."

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

"I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy - why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion."

"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?"

"...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."

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

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

"For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind - the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist."

"My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

"And then, one fairy night, May became June."

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

"When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."

"All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams."

"I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams."

"Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right."

"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."

"The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion."

"There are no second acts in American lives."

"No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see."

"The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be."

"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."

"He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse."

"Isn't Hollywood a dump - in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement."

"Action is character."

"I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiance might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic."

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

"He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows."

"A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain."

"I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation."

"She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the 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."

"Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower."

"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."

"Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures."

"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known."

"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 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."

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

"The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined."

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

"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."

"This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last."

"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."

"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

"The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody."

"You don't know what a trial it is to be -like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me."