interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.

Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.