You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble w...
THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIOIt is necessary to be very strong against something
No; that doesn't interest me.''That's because you never read a book about it.
Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know
When she cried her whole face went to pieces.
Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into th...
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what d...
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy w...
The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta....
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.
That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.