The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.

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.