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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"It takes two to make an accident."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires."

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

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

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

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…"

"...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"

"Do "you "ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!"

"New friends can often have a better time together than old friends."

"I'm a cynical idealist."