Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8