She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

He was just like summer, and she loved summer. If she had any wish, it would be to live a lifetime of summers.

You love her," Teddy observed quietly. Henry replied with an uncharacteristic lack of irony: "Yes." Teddy's eyes shifted to the plaster interlacing that decorated the ceiling in curlicues. "Lord, you never make it easy, do you." "No.

It is a truth universally acknowledge that there will always be a gentleman to dance with, except at just the moment when you require one most.

Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.

The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.