Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.

Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.