Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.

She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.