“Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.”
“Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.”
“The easiest way to hide a relationship is not to attempt to hide it.”
“He found himself smiling and talking politely to people who desired to show their respect and admiration for his uniform-instead of ignoring them and turning away. His sense of separation from and annoyance with these men and women who talked so glibly of war and who had not the faintest notion of what war was ebbed away; and he began to accept the fact that to chatter nonsense with neither knowledge nor perception was the ordinary manner of mankind.”
“Will you keep this?" he asked, holding up the pendant. "Please. Don't show it to your folks. But keep it, please. I'm not asking for anything else. You're going away. God knows when I'll see you again. I can accept what you say about your feelings for me. I have to. But what harm will it do if you take this, and then at least, I'll know that something I got for you is with you.”
“The dignity is in the worker, not in the job.”
“I suppose I have cause you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort.”
“You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age?"
"I am as old as I can be at my age. I don't know very much, but I know the water.”
“Could be off one of your own boats, Lavette," Whittier said. "The crab I mean." Whittier was hostile, contriving his hostility in witless remarks. Dan said nothing, only thinking that if this small, pompous, foolish man, so uninformed about the essence of his own business, was a measure of the hundred tycoons who ruled the hills of San Francisco, then his own way up would be none too difficult. It came down to money; if you had money, you functioned and you could do without guts or brains; and if you had money, you saw a girl like Jean Sheldon more than once, more than by accident.”
“He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use.”
“Moved by deep love, a man is courageous. And with frugality, a man becomes generous. And he who does not desire to be ahead of the world becomes the leader of the world.”
“Willfulness, such as yours, is exactly what a girl needs to raise herself up to do something useful with her life.”
“And here am I ... what did I hope - what did I expect? What rich promise did the future seem to hold out to me, when with scarcely a sigh - only a bleak sense of utter desolation - I took my leave from the brief phantom, risen for a fleeting instant, of my first love?
What has come of it all - of all that I had hoped for? And now when the shades of evening are beginning to close in upon my life, what have I left that is fresher, dearer to me, than the memories of that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in spring?”
“At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.”
“I wondered if she had any idea how much her words meant to me. You never lost me.”
“And if Travis was chocolate, then Gage was… donuts. Yes, sweet, flaky donuts. And the only thing better than donuts and chocolate was… well, donuts covered in chocolate.”
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