Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?