Save Me the Waltz

The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.

Death is the only real elegance.

People are like almanacs, Bonnie - you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.

But I warn you, I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.

Being in love, she concluded, is simply the presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life.

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.

Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn't quite because we were too smart for them!

I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.

Everybody gives you belief for the asking,' she said to David, 'and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief - just not letting you down, that's all. Its so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.' 'So easy to be loved - so hard to love.' David answered

Something may be a sort of fulfillment of yourself, and it may not be great to other people, but it is just as essential to yourself as if it is a great masterpiece.

Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o’clock.

David, I’ll fly for you, if you’ll love me!” “Fly, then.” “I can’t fly, but love me anyway.” “Poor wingless child!” “Is it so hard to love me?” “Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?

We get something to do and as soon as we've got it, it gets us.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember – that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.

We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.

You'll be sorry," he said unpleasantly. "I hope so," Alabama answered. "I like paying for the things I do-it makes me feel square with the world".

It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that hands you loved had helped in their spinning - made you feel as if the threads would hold together better.

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.

Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes.

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.

Lady Sylvia flapped across the room like an opaque protoplasm propelling itself over a sand-bank.

Her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe.

In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.