Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.