I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?