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.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were--and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.