“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
“A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bum pings followed, and everyone found himself talking to the person he least desired to.”
“He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.”
“A personality is what you thought you were….Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on–I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it over-rides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung–glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”
“…for you, not posing may be the biggest pose of all.”
“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…”
“Were there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now?–Was everyone followed in the moonlight?”
“He wanted people, people, someone sane and stupid and good.”
“Success has completely conventionalized you.”
“Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other things–we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid–rather not!”
“There are deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy; and above all a childlike simplicity that keeps us from every being really malicious.”
“Her fresh enthusiasm her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental honesty–these things are not spoiled.”
“She is quite unprincipled: her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her, but if they do not it never worries her or changes her.”
“Men don’t know how to be really angry or really happy–and the ones that do, go to pieces.”
“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. Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony….”
“The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.”
“And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.”
“Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger–“
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a ocular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher–a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
“Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.”
“I came out here to get wet–like a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind.”
“Summer has no day. 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.”
“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well out-worn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed forborne?”
“Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power–to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin–the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.”
“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state that they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood–she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
“…if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him.”
“He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want–not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable…”
Leave a Reply