I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics".

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

He felt married to her, that was all.

Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.