bailey > Recent Status Updates

« [gathering a whimsically affectionate courage from the scolding] If I am to be scolded like a boy, I must make a boy’s excuse. He began it. And he’s bigger than I am. »

« [quaintly, without fear or resistance] Catch me by the shirt collar, Morell: she will arrange it for me afterwards as she did this morning. »

« Yes, to be idle, selfish, and useless: that is, to be beautiful and free and happy: hasn’t every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves? That’s my ideal: what yours, and that of all the dreadful people who live in these hideous rows of houses? Sermons and scrubbing brushes! With you to preach the sermon and your wife to scrub. »

2 « -unless it is first spoken to. All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy! shy! shy! That is the world’s tragedy. »

1 « I go about in search of love; and I find it in unmeasured stores in the bosoms of others. But when I try to ask for it, this horrible shyness nearly strangles me; and I stand dumb, or worse than dumb, saying meaningless things: foolish lies. And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it. It must be asked for: it is like a ghost: it cannot speak-

« Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? »

"People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S Open and dined and travelled"

« Ground zero, bam, bitter taste in the back of the throat and then the gust of relief, falling backward on the bed as the sweet old punch hit me square in the heart: pure pleasure, aching and bright, far from the tin-can clatter of misery. »

« And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rain clouds, my heart in the sky. »

« …unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear. »

“It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me… As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. So we drove toward death through the cooling twilight.”

“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

“I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, profound.”

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. It’s several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.”

mary shelleys personal story makes me so deeply sad, it really adds to the gothic nature

“He was forever inviting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it.”