I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics".

You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde

A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.