After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

A squalid phantasmagoria of breath

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.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.