The Infinite Library

“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.”

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

“Human sympathy has its limits.”

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”

“All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness – and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

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

“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.”

“Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.”

“To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

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

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

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

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

“I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”

“The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.”

“It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.”

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

“I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.”

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

“Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”

“Writers aren't exactly people, they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“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.”

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

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

“By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

“After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.”

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.”

“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.”

“The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.”

“Forgotten is forgiven.”

“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”

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

“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”

“You've got an awfully kissable mouth.”

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”