This Side of Paradise quotes

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.

His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was …

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her.

He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time

, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress.

Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother.

Even at this age he had no illusions about her.

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals.

Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves.

But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.

They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became almost incoherent—“Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to have—accent—they try to impress me, my dear—”

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life.

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.

Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.

Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.

“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an interlude filled by the clergyman—“but my mood—is—oddly dissimilar.”

… Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier.

You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle.

“Washington came of very good blood—aw, quite good—I b’lieve.”

Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself by blundering on purpose.

Two years before he had commenced a history of the United States which, though it only got as far as the Colonial Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting.

“I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”

Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had not even noticed it.

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit.

Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone;

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek.

He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit.

Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”

Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been aware.

The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.

“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, poor little Count!”

After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of emotional acting.

Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature occurred in Act III of Arsène Lupin.

After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of emotional acting.

Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature occurred in Act III of Arsène Lupin.

They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinees. The line was:

… enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great halfback, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the world.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.

Code of the Young Egotist

She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal her forward like a traffic policeman.

Beatrice was what might be termed a careful driver.

“You are tall—but you’re still very handsome—you’ve skipped the awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”

“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the snarling eagle—is that the right term?”

Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the Japanese invasion.

“When do I go to school?”

He had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians.

He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be shocked.

“Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors—”

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.

“You’re not sorry to go, of course.

With people like us our home is where we are not

,” said Monsignor.

“No, you’re not.

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

”

Cottage, an impressive mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers; Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown, anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful; flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others, varying in age and position.

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out.”

The movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them were generally running it out; talking of clubs was running it out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance, drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out;

“Oh,” he said, scrutinizing these worthies, “Humbird looks like a knockout, but this Langueduc—he’s the rugged type, isn’t he?

I distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough.

”

The college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart.

It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand.

As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing.

“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.

“I’m very damn wet!” he said aloud to the sundial.

The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him.

The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon. If the P.D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The “belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions between dances.

Try to find the P.D. between dances, just try to find her.

The same girl … deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.

She should have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of themes from Thais and Carmen. She had never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it.

She had been sixteen years old for six months.

“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the dressing-room.

However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy adversary. Children, most astute of matchmakers, plot their campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament.

Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions.

…

Her education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance.

Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while slippers were fetched.

She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men who thought she was a “pretty kid—worth keeping an eye on.” But Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman.

Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored self-confidence in men.

“

He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his arms.

”

When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed, singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do what they pleased for the next two years.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life.

His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen newfound friendships through the April afternoons.

At four there were refreshments in a lunchroom, and this time they paid an even smaller percent on the total cost; something about the appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and they were not pursued.

“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry.

“We don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great test.”

“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry. “

We don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great test.

”

He was not a snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to “cultivate” him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god.

He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

“He’s like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the English officers who have been killed,” Amory had said to Alec.

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it.

Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.

”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”

“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.”

He paused and wondered if that meant anything.

He had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth.

All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid

—so useless, futile … the way animals die. … Amory was reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his childhood.

There was little in his life now that he would have changed. … Oxford might have been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and how well a dinner coat became him.

He stepped into the hall and then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.

But his life would not be unfulfilled.

He took a sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had read into her

; that this was her high point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking!

… of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.

There was always his luck.

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room.

“Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “

You’ve lost a great amount of vanity and that’s all.

”

“

We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but personages.

”

“

But do the next thing.

”

He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking down the Kreutzer Sonata, searched it carefully for the germs of Burne’s enthusiasm.

Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever.

Yet he sighed … here were other possible clay feet.

“

Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid

,” said Burne earnestly. “And this very walking at night is one of the things I was afraid about. I’m going to tell you why I can walk anywhere now and not be afraid.”

He saw one of the greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening, discussing girls’ boarding-schools with a sort of innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to her mind!

She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.

The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory’s sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels.

At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what other adorers were present.

He felt as if a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an inebriated man and herself. … People tried afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an inebriated man and herself. …

People tried afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever.

They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.

“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other.

“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”

“You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”

“You’re not a lightweight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk.

“A lightweight is an eternal nay.”

“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”

If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he’d kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same everyone knows it’s because he can’t kiss her any more.

Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

Then why do you play with men?

Within two weeks Amory and Rosalind were deeply and passionately in love. The critical qualities which had spoiled for each of them a dozen romances were dulled by the great wave of emotion that washed over them.

“It may be an insane love-affair,” she told her anxious mother, “but it’s not inane.”

The wave swept Amory into an advertising agency early in March, where he alternated between astonishing bursts of rather exceptional work and wild dreams of becoming suddenly rich and touring Italy with Rosalind.

‘It didn’t make it any easier,’ she said, ‘it just took all the courage out of it.’ I ask you, what can a man do with a girl like that? Unnecessary, I call it.”

Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly all through lunch. He thought perhaps he was one of these hollow optimists.

Again the library of the Connage house. Rosalind is alone, sitting on the lounge staring very moodily and unhappily at nothing. She has changed perceptibly—she is a trifle thinner for one thing; the light in her eyes is not so bright;

It’s just—us. We’re pitiful, that’s all.

The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.

Oh—it is Dawson Ryder. He’s so reliable, I almost feel that he’d be a—a background.

“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess.

It’s the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it.

You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground—then they kick you.”

Even Foch hasn’t half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing?

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

”

Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try but they’re hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of humor; but at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it thin.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

”

She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and whispered with a sort of romantic finality:

“I thought so, Juan, I feared so⁠—you’re sentimental. You’re not like me. I’m a romantic little materialist.”

“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” (This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.)

“Easter!” She turned up her nose. “

Huh! Spring in corsets!

”

“Summer has no day,” she said. “We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.

It’s a sad season of life without growth. … It has no day.”

“Oh, do!—or rather, don’t!

Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and skiing in Canada?

By the way, we’re going to ride up Harper’s Hill. I think that comes in our programme about five o’clock.”

If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me—I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who?

I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.

Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.

For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror.

Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass.

The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between … but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.

Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

“To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.”

This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject.

… All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Weep not for me but for thy children.

then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinée was over.

After the thick crowd came another scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally the rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers were at work.

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed.

Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

“I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world.

It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.

” He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had once impressed him—a well-dressed young man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said was:

“I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor.

Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world.

It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.”

A.—I don’t know what I’ll do—nor have I much curiosity. Tomorrow I’m going to leave New York for good.

It’s a bad town unless you’re on top of it.

Q.—Do you want a lot of money?

A.—None. I’ve no more virtue to lose.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue.

That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy.

They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon.

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind’s most familiar state—a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and physical reactions.

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

The Big Man with Goggles

His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t any windows.

He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a spiritually married man.

”