The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one's mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind

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.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.