Tender is the Night

...since sometimes beauty gives back the images of one’s best thoughts.

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

“I’ve made very few big mistakes—”
“—Only the very big ones, Baby.”

“Why doesn’t he go and speak to them? Don’t you think they’re attractive?”
“I think they’re very attractive,” Abe agreed. “I just don’t think they’re attractive, that’s all.”

Nothing could be superior to “good instincts,” honor, courtesy, and courage.

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

Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.”

They were still in the happier stage of love.
They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.
They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other.
They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.”
“My business is to tear them apart."

Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

I don’t think I’ve got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall.