Ruby Grace

“The - pan-ic - " he began but got no further, for Gloria's hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit...
Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling "One down!" every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in a grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.
Outside the storm had come up amazingly - the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defined nor conformed nor compromised.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building - its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal - again it was a triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the moment for their wars...
...The fruit of youth, or the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned