Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

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?

There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

Murder your darlings.