Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
Hae you got everything you need in the shape of-of tea?
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect-you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.
A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.
I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.
I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.
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.
The war spirit's getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I'm going to bomb out this trench.
A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
He dispensed starlight to casual moths.
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
Let us show our friendship for a man when he is living and not after he is dead.
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.
Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.
And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?
His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard a little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.
She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.
There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories