I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.
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.
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door.
They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas - that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.
The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
It takes two to make an accident.
So we beat on, boats agains the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past.
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
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.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories