These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.