Across the River and into the Trees

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...

I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.

He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.

It made him feel as a wound does that you think you cannot bear. But you can bear anything, he thought.

In America, they make such things of wire and of sponge-rubber, such as you use in the sets of tanks. You never know there, whether there is any truth in the matter, unless you are a bad boy as I am.

The colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five seconds or more.

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.

Thank you very much,” the girl said. “You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience.

Ma che cosa posso raccontare a questa ragazza, ora, in questa fredda mattina ventosa al Gritti Palace Hotel? “Che cosa vorresti sapere, Figlia?” le chiese “Tutto quanto.” “Va bene” disse il colonnello. “Incominciamo.