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 there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things...My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide

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