In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.
At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
Actually that's my secret - I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names - Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed -that voice was a deathless song.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life-it can be a superabundance of interest...
Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.
Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.
I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool
She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
But Dick had come away for his soul's sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year.
It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.
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.
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.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.
Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night
Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?
Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…
Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe's pitch - he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories