If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

There are no second acts in American lives.

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

You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.