Tender is the Night- Fitzgerald

• He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

• His eyes were of bright hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and where was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking-and this is a faltering attention, for who looks at us?--glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, or self control and of self-discipline, her own virtues.

• "You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually looked like something blooming."

• They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sough each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast...

• "But kiss me now, love me now. I'll love you and never let Nicole see."

• She was sorry, and rather relieved at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual for her to watch a man walking in a slow dream.

• This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world's rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through the partitioning of the tings of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult.

• He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole's eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory if the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.

• "...Isn't it funny and lonely being together, Dick. No place to go except close. Shall we just love and love? Ah, but I love the most, and I can tell when you're far away from me, even a little."

• Sitting on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form into the blue obscurity of the future.

• Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

• "Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there will always be the person I am to-night."

• He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, or the month or the year.
  

• His father had done that from a good heart--his father had been sure of what he was with a deep pride of the two proud widows who raised him to believe that nothing could be superior to "good instincts," honor, courtesy, and courage.
  

• ...remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

• Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him.

• ...it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was an element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.
  

• She knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize

• "It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water..."

• “You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”