Quotes from book

The Beautiful and Damned

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream”

“Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.”

“She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself”

“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.”

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

“To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.”

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

“He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”

“He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

“THE VOICE: (to BEAUTY) Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.”

“People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.”

“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”

“She was beautiful - but especially she was without mercy.”

“She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”

“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”

“This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last.”

“Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.”