This Side Of Paradise Quotes
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes." —Oscar Wilde
"A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of."
"I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous."
"I am feeling very old today, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt's. "My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must leave this terrifying place tomorrow and go searching for sunshine."
"He was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect."
"Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to 'pass' as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world..."
"With people like us our home is where we are not."
"No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me."
"I've got to go back now—hope I'm not rude—" He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be helped.
"Oh—you—wonderful girl, What a wonderful girl you are—"
"Oh, to fall in love like that, to the languorous magic melody of such a tune!"
"I'd be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people."
"I wonder about actresses; are they all pretty bad?"
"For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero."
"After the football season he slumped into dreamy content."
"The slicker was a definite element of success."
"The great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland towers."
"The tower...sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies."
"The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights."
"Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty."
"Oh, God!" he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his voice in the stillness.
"I'm very damn wet!" he said aloud to the sun-dial.
"The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them."
"Amory lay for a moment without speaking, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat."
"They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities. Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an astonishing array of feminine beauty."
"Everything was so hurried that there was no time to be bored."
"None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed."
"But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two."
"Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant."
"I wanted to come out here with you because I thought you were the best-looking girl in sight."
"He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a clear charm and noblesse oblige that varied it from righteousness."
"She had been sixteen years old for six months."
"It's just that I'm in love. Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can't call you just Isabelle, and I'm afraid I'll come out with the 'dearest' before your family this June), you've got to come to the prom."
"June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tennis courts."
"I've learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren't going to help."
"Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!"
"I'll never be a poet," said Amory as he finished. "I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry."
"All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his childhood."
"All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand."
"Each life unfulfilled, you see,It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;We have not sighed deep, laughed free,Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy."
"The very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I begged you. You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I can't be with you constantly to find whether you are doing the sensible thing."
"You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud."
"Good-morning, Fool...Three times a weekYou hold us helpless while you speak,Teasing our thirsty souls with theSleek 'yeas' of your philosophy...Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep..."
"Thought you weren't drinking," remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms....
"Come back! Come back!" Axia's arm fell on his. "Amory, dear, you aren't going, Amory!"
"Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid," said Burne earnestly.
"Well," Burne said suddenly, after a few moments' silence, "we're half-way through, let's turn back."
"It's the whole thing," he asserted. "It's the one dividing line between good and evil. I've never met a man who led a rotten life and didn't have a weak will."
"Ghosts are such dumb things," said Alec, "they're slow-witted. I can always outguess a ghost."
"Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in each of us—or were originally."
"Of course not—I can never judge a man while he's talking."
"You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination."
"My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that's a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment."
"Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is some common ancestor."
"I'm never afraid—but your reasons are so poor."
"I'm afraid of you. I'm always afraid of a girl—until I've kissed her."
"I'm not really feminine, you know—in my mind."
"I'd like to have some stock in the corporation."
"A sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."
"Yes, I suppose some day I'll marry a ton of it—out of sheer boredom."
"That was one of those romantic, pre-battle affairs. They're all wrong."
"I like business men. Clever men are usually so homely."
"Because selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves."
"I never find anything else in the world—and I loathe it."
"It's so hard to find a male to gratify one's artistic taste."
"I want to belong to you. I want your people to be my people. I want to have your babies."
"Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—"
"It's just that religion doesn't seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age."
"Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality."
"No longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial spirits."
"The only alternative to letting it get you is some violent interest."
"Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers."
"The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue."
"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't."
"For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy."
"My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity."
"Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman."
"Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it."
"I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself."
"I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention."
"Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention is."
"If there's a God let him strike me—strike me!"
"But naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun."
"Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon."
"The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night."
"Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world."
"Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man."
"Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side."
"Amory was alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth."
"All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the 'crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,' as Wells put it."
"Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.'"
"Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical."
"In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth."
"But," continued Amory disregarding him, "being very poor at present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte."
"What are you," asked the big man, "one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants."
"Oh, I'll admit there's money in it eventually. Talent doesn't starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days."
"It always means brainy and well-educated," interrupted Amory. "It means having an active knowledge of the race's experience."
"These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend here, who think they think, every question that comes up, you'll find his type in the usual ghastly muddle."
"The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I'm a militant Socialist."
"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part."