"'Clark,' she said softly, 'I wouldn't change you for the world. You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll love always--the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.'
'But you're goin' away?'
'Yes--because I couldn't ever marry you. You've a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless. I'd feel I was--wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy--the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beautiful any more.'"
--"The Ice Palace"
--"The Freshest Boy"
"Brick Wales went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in particular or that he had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords."
--"The Freshest Boy"
"He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything else wore out."
--"Babylon Revisited"
"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material."
--"Babylon Revisited"
"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."
--The Great Gatsby
"In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a streetlamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."
--Tender Is the Night
"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend."
--Tender Is the Night
"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."
--Tender Is the Night
"Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect--you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."
--Tender Is the Night
