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.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.