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

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple 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"

"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!"

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

"I'm a cynical idealist."

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

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

"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."

"Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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"

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories"

"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."

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "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 to-night."

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

"We all have souls of different ages"

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

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

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