Quotes from book

This Side of Paradise

“sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy”

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

“You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly… the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened… the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.”

“You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.”

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

“Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

“You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not… No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

“Life cracked like ice!”

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”