Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.