He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

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

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.