Quote collection
77 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered - and I was delivered to you - to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a buttonhole bouquet."
"We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion."
"Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows."
"I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones."
"Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?"
"The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens."
"It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."
"I play the radio and moon about...and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever."
"Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world."
"We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs."
"Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump."
"It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."
"Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn't quite because we were too smart for them!"
"A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether."
"I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead."
"Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure ... another chance in life."
"Youth doesn't need friends -- it only needs crowds."
"The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome."
"memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for"
"Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant."