The Beautiful and Damned

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

We all have souls of different ages

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...

All I think of ever is that I love you.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

She was beautiful - but especially she was without mercy.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.