“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reforme...”

“Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed har...”

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

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

“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?”