The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.

I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.