But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

...for a moment people set down their glasses in county clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss.