Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me, you'd better go.
...'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.
It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them.
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
You'll understand why storms are named after people.
And all I kept thinking, over and over, was; you can't live forever, you can't live forever.
I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bight and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the secret is exposed at last; the panes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such famous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.
