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Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
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That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton .... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.
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Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
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They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
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For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
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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.
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Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
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People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
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The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.
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His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
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Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
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No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
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I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!
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She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.
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First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
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There are no second acts in American lives.
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Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
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They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
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To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
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Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
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Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
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The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
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In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.