Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.