You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.

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

Mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and–and in love before they’re born.

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

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

We all have souls of different ages.

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

There is no coThere is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mindnfusion like the confusion of a simple mind

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

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

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.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.

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.

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.

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 gIt’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.reat advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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!

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

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

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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