The Reading Room

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

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

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

“Human sympathy has its limits.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

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

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

“Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, 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, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.”

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

“‏أشعرُ بقلبي يغوصُ بينَ أضلُعي”

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

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”