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Tender Is the Night Quotes

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.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
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.
I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.
In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.
Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.
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.
In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
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.
Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.
I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
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.
But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.
the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.
I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.
If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.
I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.
...there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; 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.
Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
She knew few words and believed in none.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?.
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.
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.
When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.
Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?.
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.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.
you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.
We all must try to be good.
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.
He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.
But some day I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
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.
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.
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.
It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest...
I never understood what common sense mean applied to a complicated problems.
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.
She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game.
I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.
She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.
Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.
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.
Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.
They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.
God, am I like the rest after all?"—So he used to think starting awake at night—"Am I like the rest?.
I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.