I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It's a mining town in lotus land.

I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.