Tender Is The Night

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.

* * *

Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “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.”

* * *

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings.

* * *

…they functioned on this set as cautiously, as precisely, as does a human hand picking up jagged broken glass.

* * *

They were both in the grey gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue, when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs.

* * *

People joined them as if by magic, accompanied them as specialists, almost guides, through a phase of the evening, dropped out and were succeeded by other people, so that it appeared as if the freshness of each one had been husbanded for them all day.

* * *

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.

* * *

Dick Diver came and brought with him a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders, on the crown of his hat or the gold head of his cane.

* * *

Nicole shook her head right and left, disclaiming responsibility for the matter: “So many smart men go to pieces nowadays.”

“And when haven’t they?” Dick asked. “Smart men play close to the line because they have to — some of them can’t stand it, so they quit.”

* * *

“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”

* * *

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure

* * *

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.