She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.

I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.