The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.