"What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."

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

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

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.