The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' 'How pleasant then to be insane!

Under the stars,' she repeated. 'I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.' It was a dream,' said John quietly. 'Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' How pleasant then to be insane!' So I'm told,' said John gloomily. 'I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

Nu înțelesese tot ce auzise, dar din privirea ilicită aruncată în viața intimă a celor doi - care, din câte își putea da el seama din firava lui experiență, aveau toată lumea la picioare - trăsese concluzia că pentru absolut toți oamenii viața era o luptă, uneori magnifică dacă o contemplai de departe, dar întodeauna grea, surprinzător de simplă și oarecum tristă.