Quotes from book

Tender Is the Night

“If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.”

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked.
LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.”

“Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”

“Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

“I'm not much like myself any more.”

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”

“I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.”

“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”

“But you can love more than just one person, can't you?”

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”