"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."

"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."

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"It takes two to make an accident."

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

"I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go"

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever."

"It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people."

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."

"There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice."

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

"Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand."

"They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside."

"You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody."

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!"

"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."

"It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living."